Comment by jeffhuys
7 months ago
> units
751 units, 62 prefixes
You have: 10 miles
You want: meters
* 16093.44
/ 6.2137119e-05
Huh. Never knew that was a thing!
7 months ago
> units
751 units, 62 prefixes
You have: 10 miles
You want: meters
* 16093.44
/ 6.2137119e-05
Huh. Never knew that was a thing!
It's one of my most used utilities, as someone who can't help but nerd-snipe myself on the regular. Example questions that I've used it for, just in the last week:
If I work 42 hours/week, how many minutes is that per year?
I've downloaded 4.91GB in the last minute, what's that in Mbps? How long will it take to download a 76GB game?
This AWS feature costs $0.045/hour, how much is that per month?
This guy I read about traveled 58,000km in 27 years, what's his average speed in m/s?
How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?
If a 36 inch pipeline can deliver 25580 acre-feet of water in a year, how fast is the water flowing in m/s?
Also check out Kragen's examples from a thread a couple of years ago!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988917
Wow, that’s an awesome resource actually. Thanks!
> How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?
Is there some trick to this? Or do you have to input it like:
You have: 4/3pi(10 cm)^319320 kg/m^345000 GBP/kg
(What ChatGPT gave me)
units has (I assume room temp/pressure) densities for all elements, as well as some precious metal prices and currency exchange rates (you need to run the units_cur program regularly to update the database for these). It also has tab completion to make discovering these a bit easier.
The invocation is
You have: goldprice * golddensity * spherevol(10cm/2)
You want: GBP
2 replies →
You can just save a step and ask ChatGPT the answer. It can google the current spot price of gold.
5 replies →
>25580 acre-feet of water
This is why we can't have nice things.
I always want to reach for `units`, but I'm perennially baffled by the output! What's up with the * and /?
The * value is the result of converting 10 miles to meters, as requested.
The / value is the inverse of that in case you wanted that, ie 0.1 meters in miles.
It's explained in `man 1 units`
Oh, I know it's explained in the man page. I read it every time and promptly forget because I can't internalize the choice of notation.
3 replies →
I usually call it non-interactively:
in which case it's always the first line I want.
(The second line is telling me 1USD is 0.00422357 of 1500DKK.)
Note if you use the currency conversions,
is needed to keep them up-to-date.
If you only need the first line you can invoke units with --terse.
the * is denoting the conversion from your first unit to your second, the / denotes the other way.
You have: 1 miles You want: feet * 5280 / 0.00018939394
In the above example, 1 mile is 5280 feet, and 1 foot is 0.00018939394 miles
If I do 2 miles to feet, the values are doubled (or halved for the reverse conversion)
You have: 2 miles You want: feet * 10560 / 9.469697e-05