Help me get my feet back on the ground
May 26, 2009 at 8:00 AM by Dr. Drang
units
is a Unix command line program that just doesn’t translate well to a graphical user interface.
You have: 105 m/s^2
You want: g
* 10.70702
/ 0.093396667
You have: 240 cc
You want: floz
* 8.1153654
/ 0.12322304
You have: 16 m/s
You want: mph
* 35.790981
/ 0.02794
You have: 2.7 ft water
You want: lbf/ft^2
* 168.55549
/ 0.0059327642
You have: 2.7 ft water
You want: kpascal
* 8.0704807
/ 0.12390836
You have: .6 watt/m degC
You want: btu/hr ft degF
* 0.34667223
/ 2.8845691
This is an interactive session with units
. The strengths of the program are:
- It thinks the way you do, using common abbreviations and common prefixes for powers of ten. It’s much easier to just type
kpascal
than to go through a menu or tabbed interface to find the “pascal” entry among the various pressure terms—and then divide the answer by 1000 to convert from pascals to kilopascals. (Of course, you can’t have everything.g
is commonly used for both grams and the acceleration of gravity, butunits
isn’t smart enough to use context to distinguish between the two. It has to choose one or the other, and it choseg
to mean gravitational acceleration. Grams aregm
andgram
.) - It has a huge library of units. The
water
unit is the weight density of water; multiplying it by a length gives you the pressure at the bottom of a column of water of that height. The designer of a GUI unit converter would think long and hard before adding a unit likewater
, because every additional unit takes up space in a window or a menu and makes finding the other units a little bit harder. No such problem with a command line program. - It allows you to combine units through multiplication and division, which effectively expands the library to a nearly infinite variety.
units
doesn’t need to have a special set of entries for thermal conductivity; it constructs thewatt/m degC
andbtu/hr ft degF
units on the fly because it knows all the individual components.
By the way, if you’re wondering why every conversion has a /
line, it’s because the fundamental behavior of units
—which I seldom use—is to provide the conversion factors to go back and forth between two sets of units. In this fundamental mode, you would have a session like this:
You have: m/s
You want: mph
* 2.2369363
/ 0.44704
You have: ft water
You want: kpascal
* 2.9890669
/ 0.33455256
So, for example, to go from m/s to mph, you multiply by 2.237 or divide by 0.447. It just so happens that if you put a pure number in front of the “have” units, the *
line gives you the converted value in the “want” units. You can put numbers in front of the “want” units, too, but the interpretation of the result may involve more thinking than you want to do.
You have: 2.7 ft water
You want: 10 lbf/ft^2
* 16.855549
/ 0.059327642
2.7 in feet of water is equivalent to 16.86 in tens of pounds per square foot. The /
line in conversions like this has an even weirder interpretation: if you have a pressure in tens of pounds per square foot, you divide it by 0.0593 to get it in “2.7s” of feet of water. It’s probably best not to think that way.
The units
program itself is just a conversion engine—by itself, it doesn’t know any units at all. It learns the units at startup by reading a data file. By default, this data file is /usr/share/misc/units.lib
on a Mac or /usr/share/lib/unittab
or /usr/share/units.dat
on other Unix platforms. You can tell units
to read another data file by invoking it with the -f
option:
units -f /path/to/data/file
The data file is just a text file, with each line defining a new unit (or another name for a previously defined unit). On my computer, I have a units.lib
file in my home directory that is a copy of the standard file with these additions at the end:
/ Local additions
Pa pascal
W watt
ksi 1000 psi
pcf lbf/ft3
psf lbf/ft2
ksf kip/ft2
tsf ton/ft2
The Pa
and W
lines are just synonyms so I don’t have to type out pascal
and watt
. The others are pressure, stress, and density units common in civil and mechanical engineering.
I have an alias in my .bashrc
file,
alias units='units -f ~/units.lib'
so that I can simply type units
at the command line to get my augmented units instead of just the standard ones.
One deficiency in units
is that it doesn’t allow fractional exponents1. I can think of only one use for fractional exponents, but it’s one that comes up commonly in the work I do: the fracture toughness of materials is expressed in units like or . Because I can’t express values like this in units
, I still have to convert these by hand.
The GNU version of units
differs from the standard BSD/Mac version in that it allows addition and subtraction in the conversions (standard units
allows only multiplication and division), and it uses the Readline library in interactive mode. The manual says it can do fractional exponents, but all the examples involve roots of units that are already raised to a power—there’s nothing like . Maybe I’ll download it and do some experimenting.
Update (5/27/09)
There’s now a followup post on and GNU units
.
-
As far as I know. If you know better, please tell me about it. ↩