Submitted by None on 2010-01-01 20:53:12

I recently switched all our machines to use '-u GB' with check_disk
which was a vast improvement for most machines. However it's turns
out to be less useful for small drives, e.g.

| $ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_disk -u GB -w 40% -c 20% -p /
| DISK WARNING - free space: / 0 GB (35% inode=74%);| /=1GB;0;0;0;1

To try and work around this, I added a --human-readable option, a la
GNU df(1), e.g.

| $ ./check_disk --human-readable -w 40% -c 20% -p /
| DISK WARNING - free space: / 632M (35% inode=74%);| /=1163MB;1134;1512;0;1891

I've attached the patch I used to do this; would it be possible to
include it (or something like it) in future releases of
nagios-plugins?

A few notes:

1. It requires importing the 'human' module from gnulib into 'gl'. I
   didn't attach a patch to do this, since the resulting patch is
   messy and very dependent on the versions of auto* and gnulib on my
   local system. If you want such a patch anyway, I'll be happy to
   provide one.

2. It's based on 1.4.13+git200906171200 because that's the version in
   Ubuntu right now; if you want a patch rebased against current git,
   please let me know.

3. I chose to avoid altering the performance data and separated the
   new option from -u/--units as that seemed to make the most sense
   to me but if you want it done differently, I'm happy to do that
   too.

4. I used --human-readable and 'Z' (internally only) as the options;
   this is different from df(1) which dedicates -h to the option, but
   I assumed consistency with other plugins would trump consistency
   with df(1)?