There is an easy convenience to using human readable numbers. Instead of a number like 1,099,511,627,776 you can use 1T. Instead of 1,073,741,824 you can use 1G and instead of 1,024 you can use 1K (that 1K = 1,024 is why the other numbers don’t end with multiple zeros).

But how do you do some (simple) math with human readable numbers, like adding up a list?

This is where numfmt comes to your aid.

For example, lets make a list of numbers:

259G
1.1G
692G
5.5G
5.3G
140M
30G
302G
222G
281M
1.9G
60G
2.2T

If we put those in a file called sizes.txt we can sum them with a simple command like this:

cat sizes.txt | numfmt --from=iec | awk 's+=$1 {} END {print s}'  | numfmt --to=iec

The --from=iec converts the numbers from human readable format to numbers, the awk adds the numbers, and then the second numfmt converts the sum back to a human readable number,