[ghostfish]

My thoughts exactly. This is just complexity for complexity's sake. Useful as an exercise, but the -h flag already does this is an even more readable manner.

[bajsejohannes]

This works with sorting, and it's easier to pick big files out at a glance. I would use this as often as -h

[cheald]

`ls -lhS` works just fine to sort with human-readable sizes, at least on Fedora.

[runejuhl]

You could also use 'ls -lh | sort -h'.

[sliverstorm]

I believe that's only supported in newer versions of sort.