Hacker News Reader

Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

If you run Linux and have the `units` program installed, you can even do it without reaching for a web page:

  $ units '1-(11hr+22min)/(11hr+55min)'                                                                                                 
          Definition: 0.046153846

View on HN

the Math is trivial - it's a bit more of a half an hour out of ~12h. That's bit more than 1/24 = ~4.5%.

Just tried this on macOS but it must be a different 'units' command as it won't accept that input. :-(

However I just discovered that if you hit command spacebar and paste that into the spotlight search it gives the right answer! Spotlight has always done simple unit conversions but it didn't used to be able to do calculations with units in them. I wonder when that was introduced...

MacOS's default units(1) is the BSD version.

GNU Units is far more featureful (and useful IMO).

You can install that, as "gunits", using Homebrew.

Most of the time I can get away with pretending MacOS is just sitting on top of Linux, but occasionally the BSD differences pop up and bite me.

GNU/Linux, or as I've recently been taking to calling it, GNU plus Linux

There is no gunits formula on homebrew, the formula is called gnu-units.

The command to use it is `gunits` though.

Given that I invoke GNU Units far more often than I install it, yes, I referred to the command name.

It's trivial to find the actual package name using 'brew list | grep units'.

See note 2: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449413>

Or you can just convert it into minutes...

I suspect a lot more people here will have access to a browser than to a Linux shell with a specific tool installed.

A lot of us always have a shell open on the side (we are dozens!!), so it's nice to learn about such tricks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com