You could use GNU units. It appears to treat SI prefixes as strictly base 10, so use the KiB/MiB etc. variants where applicable: > $ units 8112116KiB MiB > * 7921.9883 > / 0.00012623094 Something like > …2>&1| awk '/transferred/' {print $1}'|while read i; do units "${i}bytes" "GiB"; done That will need playing around with.