Christopher Samuel wrote:
it appears that this ordering is derived purely on an ordering of the suffixes rather than doing any form of conversion.
It's not purely the suffixes; it looks at suffixes first, and looks at the numbers if the suffixes are equal.
Looking at both would require arbitrary-precision arithmetic, something that 'sort' doesn't do (it does only arbitrary-precision comparison). It would also require knowing whether the base was 1000 or 1024. Bit of a hassle, that.
numfmt is a workaround, but has rounding problems.
