udunits2
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This manual describes how to use the udunits2 program. This program allows you to discover the definition of a unit as well as convert numeric values between compatible units.

     [file LICENSE not included]

Synopsis
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     udunits2 [-A|-L|-U] [-hr] [XML_file]

Options
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The following options and arguments are supported:

-A
     Use the ASCII character-set.

-L
     Use the ISO Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character-set.

-U
     Use the full Unicode character-set with UTF-8 encoding.

-h
     Print a help message.

-r
     Reveal any problems with the units database (by default, no error messages are printed during import of the database).

XML_file
     The pathname of the XML-formatted units database. If not specified, then the default, compile-time pathname is used.

Description
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When successfully started, the program will print the prompt

     You have:

At this point you can exit the program by entering the end-of-file character (usually control-D) or continue by entering either a value or a unit. (a value comprises a numerical value and a unit. For example,

     You have: 80 km/h
     You want:

At this point, if you enter a blank line, then the program will assume that you entered a unit in the previous line and will print the definition of that unit in terms of the base units of the unit-system that it imported on startup.  For example,

     You have: 80 km/h
     You want:
         22.2222222222222 m.s-1
     You have:

Details of the formatting depend on the character-set being used. See Options.

Alternatively, at the ``You want:'' prompt you can enter the unit in which you want the previously-entered value. For example,

     You have: 80 km/h
     You want: mi/h
         80 km/h = 49.7097 mi/h
         x/(mi/h) = 0.621371*(x/(km/h))
     You have:

The first line after ``You want:'' shows the ``have'' value in the desired ``want'' unit.

The second line shows the transformation between numerical values in the ``have'' unit to numerical values in the ``want'' unit.  The symbol ``x'' represents the physical quantity in question. See http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec07.html.

See Also
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See UDUNITS-2 (The UDUNITS-2 C API Guide), for information on the UDUNITS-2 library, which is used by this program.