AWS S3 CLI ls in a Human Readable Format

AWS CLI allows us to interact with the AWS from the command line, known also as terminal. A very common command is the:

aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket/my-path/

where the output is like:

2021-11-18 15:55:20   29161259 file_01.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:21   29137661 file_02.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:21   29154017 file_03.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   29160631 file_04.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   29148803 file_05.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   29155569 file_06.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   29169410 file_07.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   29152556 file_08.csv

As we can see, the size of the files is in bytes. If we want the output to be in a “human-readable format” and also to have a summary of the folder we can add the following flags to the ls command:

aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket/my-path/ --human-readable --summarize

And we get:

2021-11-18 15:55:20   27.8 MiB file_01.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:21   27.8 MiB file_02.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:21   27.8 MiB file_03.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   27.8 MiB file_04.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   27.8 MiB file_05.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   27.8 MiB file_06.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   27.8 MiB file_07.csv
2021-11-18 15:55:20   27.8 MiB file_08.csv

Total Objects: 8
   Total Size: 222.4 MiB

Finally, if you want to see the size of all folders and subfolder in a human readable format, you can add the –recursive flag. For example:

aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket/ --human-readable --summarize --recursive