Version 0.0.4, June 2024
uconv is a general-purpose unit converter for use on the
command line. It is primarily intended for domestic and general
scientific applications, supporting conversions for length, area, volume,
mass, force, energy, radiation dose, fuel economy, temperature, pressure,
velocity, acceleration, data capacity, and many others. For non-metric units,
uconv favours UK variants over US ones, but the US versions are
also available.
There are many (perhaps too many) unit converter programs available; most have
graphical interfaces. uconv is intended to be sufficiently
flexible in its unit specification that it is faster to use than a graphical
program.
An example of command line usage might be:
$ uconv 60 cuft m3 60 cubic feet = 1.69901 cubic metres
A more complex example:
$ uconv 200 m/sec2/g ft/min2/lb 200 metres/square second/gramme = 1.07148E+09 feet/square minute/pound
The number and the first unit can be written together:
$ uconv 2gib/sec mb/sec 2 gibibytes/second = 2147.48 megabytes/second
uconv recognizes a hundred or so basic units, but the potential
conversions are very much more extensive than this, as units can be combined.
The program recognizes combined units in a variety of formats:
m/sec, m/sec^2, m/sec2, m/sec/sec, etc.
In fact, uconv will convert between any pair of units that are
dimensionally consistent. For example, you can convert joules per second per
kilogram to calories per minute per pound, if you wish. The program won't
attempt to convert, for example, minutes to metres -- these are not
dimensionally consistent units. However, any pair of measurements that
can be reduced
to the same basic set of core units (metre, gramme, second, newton,
ampere, byte)
should be convertible. uconv will even convert units that
are complementary, that is, having dimensions that are the inverse of
one another. So it can convert, for example, minutes per mile into miles per hour.
uconv attempts to be very flexible in the way units are
interpreted, so the user doesn't have to spend too much time studying a manual
to find the proper format. So square meters, for example, can be entered as 'sq
m', 'square meter', 'sq metres', 'm2', 'sqm', among many others. The usual SI
prefixes -- kilo, micro, etc -- are recognized, both in full and as
abbreviations.
As of version 0.0.4, uconv includes data capacity among
its basic unit, and can convert quantities involving both metric and
IEC capacity units. That is, it can convert quanities involving
(IEC) gibibytes and the like, to quanitities involving (metric) megabytes
and the like.
uconv is written in ANSI-standard C, and will compile on
more-or-less any platform with a C compiler.
Although there are many unit conversion applications around, I wrote
uconv because I needed something that would work on the command line,
on all the platforms I use, including Android. This means, essentially,
a plain C program. The GNU 'units' utility almost fits the bill
-- units is hugely flexible but, for me, way too
clunky in its use of the command line. In addition, its bloated
database of obscure units makes it hard to find things when you're not sure
of the name or abbreviation.
Please note: uconv is not related in any way to the Unicode
converter with the same name.
To build from source, unpack the source bundle and
run make, followed
by make install. uconv has no unusual dependencies,
and should build on most POSIX-like platforms.
NOTE: because uconv is an executable that already exists on
many Linux installations, it's possible to rename the binary at installation
time:
sudo NAME=unconv make install
This not only renames the files, but changes the name of the utility in the man page.
See the uconv man page.
uconv is maintained by Kevin Boone with substantial
contributions from other authors. It is copyright (c)2013-2024, distributed
under the terms of the GNU Public Licence, version 3.0. There is no
warranty of any kind.