jaapie / how-many

A small Ruby CLI script that answers the question: "How many seconds in a year" and and other time-related queries.

How Many?

how-many is a small Ruby CLI script that answers questions like: "How many seconds are there in a year", and many more.

I created this script so that when I wanted to shutdown -r -t ? a server in 8h and 23 minutes I didn't have to ask Google or Spotlight.

It has a simple, natural language style interface, with some output formatting options. For example:

$ how-many seconds in 1 year
31536025.919999998
$ hay-many weeks in 1 month
4.3452416666666664

The script understands the following time units:

• seconds
• minutes
• hours
• days
• weeks
• fortnights
• months
• years

By default, results will be displayed as floating point numbers, however you can pass the -t option (use the -h or --help option for more information) to choose integer, in which case the number is rounded up.

It uses the definition that a year is 52.1429 weeks. There are 24.0072 hours in 0.1429 weeks.

Operations

how-many will understand two operations: in and till. It currently only understands in. That means you can ask it how many of one unit will fit into another. I am implementing the till function next. You will he able to ask:

$how-many seconds till 10pm

or

$how-many days till 2020-02-20

Using the Script

The script is pretty basic in that that is all it is. You just need to copy it to a place on your $PATH so you can use it anywhere, or put it somewhere and call it by prepending ./ (if it is in the current directory) or its path (if it is anywhere else).

I'm not sure how'd you go getting it running on windows, but you could probably find a GUI for what you want anyhow.

Contributing

I welcome comments, criticisms, praise, pointers to tools that already did this, and most of all contributions in the form of pull-requests.

License

This work is distributed under the MIT license as you can read about in the LICENSE.md file.

Author

how-many was written by me, Jacob Degeling, in my spare time. I am a School IT Manager whose first love in the computer world was programming.

:wq