(Source)
The sort command has a -h switch which allows it to sort "human-readable" sizes in the output of other commands:
$ du -cksh
220K argparse
36K balanced-match
32K base64-js
24K brace-expansion
28K concat-map
68K glob
24K inflight
24K inherits
2.1M lodash
44K minimatch
64K mkpath
20K node-version-compare
16K once
16K path-is-absolute
516K plist
24K rimraf
76K sax
76K underscore
72K underscore.string
24K util-deprecate
20K wrappy
4.5M xml2js
104K xmlbuilder
100K xmldom
936K yamljs
9.1M total
$ du -cksh * | sort -h
16K once
16K path-is-absolute
20K node-version-compare
20K wrappy
24K brace-expansion
24K inflight
24K inherits
24K rimraf
24K util-deprecate
28K concat-map
32K base64-js
36K balanced-match
44K minimatch
64K mkpath
68K glob
72K underscore.string
76K sax
76K underscore
100K xmldom
104K xmlbuilder
220K argparse
516K plist
936K yamljs
2.1M lodash
4.5M xml2js
9.1M total
On OS X the built-in sort does not support -h. Fortunately, the GNU sort can be used as gsort after coreutils are installed:
$ brew install coreutils
$ du -cksh * | gsort -h