Bash – Handy parsing for numbers with unit suffixes

Let's say you have data with quantities in human-readable format, such as the output of du -h, and want to further operate on those numbers. Let's say you want to pipe your data through grep to do a summation of a sub-set of that data. You do this ad-hoc on many systems you've never seen before, and have only minimal utilities. You want suffix conversions for all the standard 10^n suffixes.

Exists a gnu-linux utility to convert the suffixed numbers to real numbers within a pipeline? Do you have a bash function written to do this, or some perl which might be easy to remember, instead of a length of regex replacements or several sed steps?

38M     /var/crazyface/courses/200909-90147
2.7M    /var/crazyface/courses/200909-90157
1.1M    /var/crazyface/courses/200909-90159
385M    /var/crazyface/courses/200909-90161
1.3M    /var/crazyface/courses/200909-90169
376M    /var/crazyface/courses/200907-90171
8.0K    /var/crazyface/courses/200907-90173
668K    /var/crazyface/courses/200907-90175
564M    /var/crazyface/courses/200907-90178
4.0K    /var/crazyface/courses/200907-90179

| grep 200907 | <amazing suffix conversion> | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'

Relevant references:

• How can I sort du -h output by size
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2557649/convert-memory-size-human-readable-into-actual-number-bytes-in-perl