On: GNU Units

[lozf]

Same here back in the early aughts, but it took me a while to really dig in and discover that units also handles times too.

e.g. units "sec $(echo $SECONDS)" "day;hr;min;sec"

[philjackson → lozf]

Useless use of echo there.

[x0 → philjackson]

It's very important to watch out for useless uses of echo/cat. What is cat, a few megabytes now? Fine for those of us on modern hardware, but you never know what PDP-11 user is going to copy paste your comment into their terminal.

[ttul → philjackson]

Not unless you’re also trying to demonstrate the magic of fork.

[techbio → philjackson]

Extraneously strenuous use of "useless" when using "redundant" would have done...unless useless has another usage.

EDIT: The commenter echoed, duckly.

[watersb → philjackson]

I use a construct like this to ensure that the value ends with a newline.

[smorrow → watersb]

$() chomps the newline though...

[lozf → philjackson]

noted, thanks