12 Environment Variables

The units program uses the following environment variables:

HOME

Specifies the location of your home directory; it is used by units to find a personal units data file ‘.units’. On systems running Microsoft Windows, units tries to determine your home directory from the HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH environment variables if HOME does not exist.

LC_CTYPE, LANG

Checked to determine the locale if units cannot obtain it from the operating system. Sections of the standard units data file are specific to certain locales.

MYUNITSFILE

Specifies your personal units data file. If this variable exists, units uses its value rather than searching your home directory for ‘.units’. The personal units file will not be loaded if any data files are given using the ‘-f’ option.

PAGER

Specifies the pager to use for help and for displaying the conformable units. The help function browses the units database and calls the pager using the ‘+n’n syntax for specifying a line number. The default pager is more; PAGER can be used to specify alternatives such as less, pg, emacs, or vi.

UNITS_ENGLISH

Set to either ‘US’ or ‘GB’ to choose United States or British volume definitions, overriding the default from your locale.

UNITSFILE

Specifies the units data file to use (instead of the default). You can only specify a single units data file using this environment variable. If units data files are given using the ‘-f’ option, the file specified by UNITSFILE will be not be loaded unless the -f option is given with the empty string (‘units -f ""’).