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The units program includes currency exchange rates and prices for some
precious metals in the database. Of course, these values change over
time, sometimes very rapidly, and units
cannot provide real
time values. To update the exchange rates run the
units_cur
, which rewrites the files containing the currency
rates, typically /usr/share/units/currency.units. This program
requires python
and the unidecode
package, and must
be run with suitable permissions to write the file. To keep the rates
updated automatically, run it using a cron job on a Unix-like system, or
a similar scheduling program on a different system. Currency exchange
rates are taken from Time Genie (http://www.timegenie.com) and
precious metals pricing from Packetizer (www.packetizer.com).
These sites update once per day, so there is no benefit in running the
update script more often than daily. You can run units_cur
with a filename specified on the command line and it will write the data
to that file. If you give ‘-’ for the file it will write to
standard output.