Dear,
in February we had a discussion on the net under the title "kilo is k
and not K".
My initial remark was that the "K" printout of ls was not according to
the Si standard,
which only defines "k". I understood this could be solved by using the
option --si.
As the discussion proceded, it became clear that the "K" in fact does
mean 1000 but 2^10 =1024,
a power of 2. The "M" also doesn't mean 10^6, but 2^20 = *1 048 576.
*These are computer science units which are much easier to retrieve from
the binary operating computer than the decimal Si counterparts.
This is defined by the IEC standard:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
It specifies "Ki" as the symbol for kibi-, "Mi" as the symbol for mibi.
According to the standard, K means Ki = kibi. "M" means Mi = mibi,
and so on.
"K" in the displayed -h output represents a kibi-, symbol Ki (see
lib/human.c).
The conclusion then was that we needed a new ls option "--iec" like "--si"
The --iec would write out "ib" prefixes as defined by the IEC standard:
Eg: 4,1Ki, 34Mi, ...
Would someone be willing to implement this?
Best regards,
Francky Leyn
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