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Comment by michaelx386 | Hacker News Reader

Great story with the added bonus of showing me the GNU Units command. What a fantastic program, no more Googling when I need to convert stuff.

Or were you using GNU Units the whole time?

Indeed, I just checked OSX - sadly, units doesn't know about millilightseconds ("586 units, 56 prefixes").

"milli lightsecond" should do it.

"milli lightsecond" doesn't work on OSX unfortunately (under 10.6 at least). One value which does work is "3 c-millisecond".

(I learned this by reading the /usr/share/misc/units.lib file and finding the lightyear definition: "c-yr")

Ah, whoops, I assumed it was GNU Units. Thanks and c-millisecond is cute.

GNU Units (available in Homebrew) is much more complete than the OS X version.

Much better: "2562 units, 85 prefixes, 66 nonlinear units"

Since it took me a moment to figure it out, heres how to install it:

brew install gnu-units

then run as: gunits

So it lives happily besides the default units command.

It still won't let me convert 'bytes / square mm' to my prefered data density format, 'libraries of congress / football field'. So it needs work.

It does, amusingly, know about nanoacres, a unit of measurement sometimes employed when describing chip die surface area.

Take a look at qalculator. You won't even remember about Units after it.