Here's a fun one to try...

units -v lightyear "light year"

Confused? Try "units -v" on each of the terms individually, and the results might be enlightening, albeit a bit time-consuming. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Astronomy geeks might want to browse the units.dat file (RTFM), to find out just how many ways you can define a year! :P

And speaking of RTFM, +1 for units as a future RTFM topic.

Gilbert

On 21/04/2015 10:38 AM, Michael Doob wrote:

So you can also compute how many feet light travels in a nanosecond (Try it; you can remember the answer with less than 2% error).

RIP Grace Hopper! (Look it up if you're too young to remember.)

Cheers, Michael

On 15-04-21 09:22 AM, Sean Walberg wrote:

...

My favourite has always been:

You have: 1 nanoacres You want: mm2

• 4.0468564

/ 0.24710538

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 8:41 AM, Bradford C. Vokey <brad@fsi.ca mailto:brad@fsi.ca> wrote:

And once again, I learn something new from the master Adam.

I'z immediately "yum install units"

I think units(1) might make a good RTFM? Especially going over
some of it's esoteric units (i.e. millilightseconds? really?).

Or have we done units and I just can't remember?

===
Bradford C. Vokey

Treasurer
Manitoba Unix User Group
===

On 2015-04-21 6:53 AM, roundtable-request@muug.mb.ca
<mailto:roundtable-request@muug.mb.ca> wrote:

...

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
         * 558.84719
         / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."