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by willyt 1198 days ago
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...

1 comments

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.

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>

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