How do I make `ls` show file sizes in megabytes?

 linux - How do I make `ls` show file sizes in megabytes? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

ls -l --block-size=M will give you a long format listing (needed to actually see the file size) and round file sizes up to the nearest MiB.

If you want MB (10^6 bytes) rather than MiB (2^20 bytes) units, use --block-size=MB instead.

If you don't want the M suffix attached to the file size, you can use something like --block-size=1M. Thanks Stéphane Chazelas for suggesting this.

If you simply want file sizes in "reasonable" units, rather than specifically megabytes, then you can use -lh to get a long format listing and human readable file size presentation. This will use units of file size to keep file sizes presented with about 1-3 digits (so you'll see file sizes like 6.1K, 151K, 7.1M, 15M, 1.5G and so on.

The --block-size parameter is described in the man page for ls; man ls and search for SIZE. It allows for units other than MB/MiB as well, and from the looks of it (I didn't try that) arbitrary block sizes as well (so you could see the file size as a number of 429-byte blocks if you want to).

Note that both --block-size and -h are GNU extensions on top of the Open Group's ls, so this may not work if you don't have a GNU userland (which most Linux installations do). The ls from GNU Coreutils 8.5 does support --block-size and -h as described above. Thanks to kojiro for pointing this out.