Re: kilo is k and not K

[Philip Rowlands]

(re-adding bug-coreutils again)

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Francky Leyn wrote:

> > http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html specifies "Ki" as the symbol 
> > for kibi-.
>
> Is this NIST standard acknowledged by ISO, ANSI or others?

 From the webpage: "The complete citation for this revised standard is 
IEC 60027-2, Second edition, 2000-11, Letter symbols to be used in 
electrical technology - Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics."

I don't know enough about the various standards bodies to say whether 
they incorporate, acknowledge or merely reference each other's work.

> Perhaps it is a good idea to allow 2 letter prefixes for the kibi and 
> others, triggered by for example the --NIST option?

I doubt that the effort is worthwhile, although anyone is welcome to 
submit a patch for the maintainer's consideration (N.B. I am not the 
coreutils maintainer).

I suspect that the average user who understands the difference between 
the suffixes also knows how to obtain their preferred output, and that 
others suffice with the defaults; --human-readable is arguably not a 
request for a high degree of precision.


Cheers,
Phil