It would be useful if sort could understand numeric abbreviations, for example 1k = 1,000 and 1K = 1024. This need arises for me very often when I want a sorted list of human-readable file sizes like the output of "du -h". Currently, to use "sort" you have to resort to raw numbers, which are hard to read if they have 7 or more digits. I'm sure the feature would useful more generally.
This feature can be implemented as part of the "--general-numeric" option to "sort". Alternatively, maybe coreutils should include a general program to parse numbers in text and re-format them, while outputting the rest of the text unchanged.
