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units
To invoke units for interactive use, type units at your shell prompt. The program will print something like this:
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2014-03-05 2860 units, 109 prefixes, 85 nonlinear units You have:
At the ‘You have:’ prompt, type the quantity and units that
you are converting from. For example, if you want to convert ten
meters to feet, type 10 meters. Next, units
will print
‘You want:’. You should type the units you want to convert
to. To convert to feet, you would type feet. If the
readline
library was compiled in then tab will
complete unit names. See Readline Support, for more information
about readline
. To quit the program under Unix, press
Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D. Under Windows, press Ctrl-C or
Ctrl-Z; with the latter, you may also need to press Enter.
The result will be displayed in two ways. The first line of output,
which is marked with a ‘*’ to indicate multiplication, gives the
result of the conversion you have asked for. The second line of output,
which is marked with a ‘/’ to indicate division, gives the inverse
of the conversion factor. If you convert 10 meters to feet,
units
will print
* 32.808399 / 0.03048
which tells you that 10 meters equals about 32.8 feet. The second number gives the conversion in the opposite direction. In this case, it tells you that 1 foot is equal to about 0.03 dekameters since the dekameter is 10 meters. It also tells you that 1/32.8 is about 0.03.
The units
program prints the inverse because sometimes it is a
more convenient number. In the example above, for example, the inverse
value is an exact conversion: a foot is exactly 0.03048 dekameters.
But the number given the other direction is inexact.
If you convert grains to pounds, you will see the following:
You have: grains You want: pounds * 0.00014285714 / 7000
From the second line of the output you can immediately see that a grain is equal to a seven thousandth of a pound. This is not so obvious from the first line of the output. If you find the output format confusing, try using the --verbose option:
You have: grain You want: aeginamina grain = 0.00010416667 aeginamina grain = (1 / 9600) aeginamina
If you request a conversion between units that measure reciprocal
dimensions, then units
will display the conversion results with an extra
note indicating that reciprocal conversion has been done:
You have: 6 ohms You want: siemens reciprocal conversion * 0.16666667 / 6
Reciprocal conversion can be suppressed by using the --strict option. As usual, use the --verbose option to get more comprehensible output:
You have: tex You want: typp reciprocal conversion 1 / tex = 496.05465 typp 1 / tex = (1 / 0.0020159069) typp You have: 20 mph You want: sec/mile reciprocal conversion 1 / 20 mph = 180 sec/mile 1 / 20 mph = (1 / 0.0055555556) sec/mile
If you enter incompatible unit types, the units
program will
print a message indicating that the units are not conformable and
it will display the reduced form for each unit:
You have: ergs/hour You want: fathoms kg^2 / day conformability error 2.7777778e-11 kg m^2 / sec^3 2.1166667e-05 kg^2 m / sec
If you only want to find the reduced form or definition of a unit, simply press Enter at the ‘You want:’ prompt. Here is an example:
You have: jansky You want: Definition: fluxunit = 1e-26 W/m^2 Hz = 1e-26 kg / s^2
The output from units
indicates that the jansky is defined to be
equal to a fluxunit which in turn is defined to be a certain combination
of watts, meters, and hertz. The fully reduced (and in this case
somewhat more cryptic) form appears on the far right.
Some named units are treated as dimensionless in some situations. These units include the radian and steradian. These units will be treated as equal to 1 in units conversions. Power is equal to torque times angular velocity. This conversion can only be performed if the radian is dimensionless.
You have: (14 ft lbf) (12 radians/sec) You want: watts * 227.77742 / 0.0043902509
It is also possible to compute roots and other non-integer powers of dimensionless units; this allows computations such as the altitude of geosynchronous orbit:
You have: cuberoot(G earthmass / (circle/siderealday)^2) - earthradius You want: miles * 22243.267 / 4.4957425e-05
Named dimensionless units are not treated as dimensionless in other contexts. They cannot be used as exponents so for example, ‘meter^radian’ is forbidden.
If you want a list of options you can type ? at the ‘You want:’ prompt. The program will display a list of named units that are conformable with the unit that you entered at the ‘You have:’ prompt above. Conformable unit combinations will not appear on this list.
Typing help at either prompt displays a short help message. You can also type help followed by a unit name. This will invoke a pager on the units data base at the point where that unit is defined. You can read the definition and comments that may give more details or historical information about the unit. (You can generally quit out of the page by pressing ‘q’.)
Typing search text will display a list of all of the units whose names contain text as a substring along with their definitions. This may help in the case where you aren’t sure of the right unit name.
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