Computers are for humans

Well, also for computers too, nowdays. Human readable info is still quite valuable.


Kalle Tolonen
April 1, 2026


TIL - Linux/Unix based systems have really nice tooling flags for ls.

ls -lah backups
total 426240
drwxr-xr-x@  3 kalle.tolonen  staff    96B Apr  1 11:07 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 30 kalle.tolonen  staff   960B Apr  1 11:06 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 kalle.tolonen  staff   201M Apr  1 11:07 backup_20260401_110700.sql.gz

ls -la backups 
total 426240
drwxr-xr-x@  3 kalle.tolonen  staff         96 Apr  1 11:07 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 30 kalle.tolonen  staff        960 Apr  1 11:06 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 kalle.tolonen  staff  210376143 Apr  1 11:07 backup_20260401_110700.sql.gz

The latter one is harder to read, since it doesn't have the human readable-flag. Humans are really bad with reading long numbers, so this is a super-nice touch of humanity.

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