Number::Bytes::Human

I came across a useful Perl module today called Number::Bytes::Human. I occassionally download files from the newsgroups using nzbperl, which tells me once it's started how big the download is expected to be. That's all well and good, but what if I want to find that out before starting up nzbperl?

I decided to write a quick script to extract the byte size from the .nzb file, but it occurred to me halfway through writing it that I didn't want to spend the brainpower this evening to make the output human readable (megabytes and gigabytes, as opposed to bytes). CPAN to the rescue! My script isn't long, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it here. I saved it as ~/bin/nzbsize, but you can call it whatever you want.


#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Number::Bytes::Human qw(format_bytes);

my $file = slurp( $ARGV[0] );
my $bytes;

while ( $file =~ s{bytes="(.*?)"}{} ) {
$bytes += $1;
}
my $hr = format_bytes( $bytes );

print "Bytes: $bytes\n";
print "Human Readable: $hr\n";
exit;

# Since I'm not running Perl 5.10 just yet
sub slurp {
my ( $file_name ) = @_;
local $/;
open INPUT, "<$file_name";
return <INPUT>;
}


The output's going to look something of like this:


jhall@bourdain nzb$ nzbsize Knoppix5.1.1.nzb
Bytes: 782635787
Human Readable: 747M
jhall@bourdain nzb$


Update: instead of using this version, you probably want to check out the optimized version.