Looking for a program that will do conversions

Support and Help
1

I am looking for a program that will do conversions on units like TB, GB, MB, Inches, feet, quart, pint, etc. I swear I used to have one but its gone away. I think it was actually called “convert” but won’t swear it.

Thoughts?

2

Qalculate works well for this -

sudo apt install qalculate-gtk
3

There’s also convertall.

4

Convert is part of Image Magick, for converting between image formats.

There are no doubt many others, but I use convert.

$ sudo apt install units

The man page runs to over a thousand lines… it’s very comprehensive. You can use is in a script or interactively. Below is an example of interactive use with the -v (verbose) option.

$ units -v
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2022-09-05 
3753 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units

You have: 9 inches
You want: cm
	9 inches = 22.86 cm
	9 inches = (1 / 0.043744532) cm
You have: 2 TB
You want: MB
	2 TB = 2000000 MB
	2 TB = (1 / 5e-07) MB
You have: 2 TB
You want: MiB
	2 TB = 1907348.6 MiB
	2 TB = (1 / 5.24288e-07) MiB
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5

Here is an advanced online tool …

WolframAlpha Conversion

6

On Ubuntu 25.04 you have gnome-calculator. what OS do you use?

7

Thank you for all the replies!

I decided on convertall (seemed the easiest)

thanks again!

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8

Thank you for the reply…

I installed units but couldn’t figure it out. Then
I tried the convertital and that fixed me up. Now
I’ll try to delete units. I also went to the magic
place and that is a huge thing for everything!
Kinda scared me away.

Anyway, thank you again - I appreciated it.

9

Hello drufus2002,
Like you I hesitated at the apparent complexity of Calculate!, but this feature-packed programme also has some pleasant surprises for the average user who is just trying to improve his day-to-day productivity.
Here’s a practical example:
With an easy to remember syntax in input “4732s to h”
And Calculate! gives me the result I was looking for:
= 1 h + 18 min + 52 s
While gnome-calculator and many others converters only give this answer:
= 1.3144 h
So, thanks to halogen2 for the suggestion and congratulations to Hanna Knutsson and the others developers who mainten this application.

1 Like
10

Yes, some tools will give you a result as a decimal, which when you’re working in hours, minutes and second can be less than helpful…

The units command can take a while to learn, but when you’ve learnt it it becomes very, very useful. It can also do calculations, imagine that I have a recipe that needs 1lb 6oz of flour at the start and then 18oz of flour later and I want to check that I have enough in my bag of flour, but my scales weigh only in grams:

$ units -v
Currency exchange rates from exchangerate-api.com (USD base) on 2024-02-18 
Consumer price index data from US BLS, 2024-02-18 
7235 units, 125 prefixes, 134 nonlinear units

You have: 1lb + 6oz + 18oz
You want: grams
	1lb + 6oz + 18oz = 1133.9809 grams
	1lb + 6oz + 18oz = (1 / 0.00088184905) grams
11

Thanks for the reply!

My problem with units is that I have no idea how to even start with units.

Have a clue?

Thanks again!