I was using du to create an extension attribute & noticed it now has a helpful option which obviates some ugly math:
--si “Human-readable” output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte based on powers of 1000.
This is nice because the macOS GUI shows file / folder sizes (& has for a while...) using 1000-byte blocks. My Mac on Big Sur does not show the --si option so I am assuming this is a Monterey thing... Not sure?
E.g., you may have run du in a script in the past & got a result like this:
% du -h -s ~
29G /Users/Brock.Walters
So your boss says "Great, how come 'Get Info' says 32GB huh Mr. Smarty Script Guy?"
Well, 1) rounding & 2) 1024-byte blocks vs. 1000-byte blocks.
The solution was maybe something like this:
% echo "scale=1; $(du -s ~ | awk '{print $1}')/2000000" | bc | awk '{print int($0+0.5)"G"}'
31G
Which, let's face it, is gross. The --si option makes all of that unnecessary because it calculates in 1000-byte blocks!
% du --si -s ~
32G /Users/Brock.Walters
