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lunar(1)               DragonFly General Commands Manual              lunar(1)


NAME

       lunar (version 2.1) - a calendar conversion utility


SYNTAX

       lunar [ -h ] [ -5 ] [ -b ] [ -i ] [ -l ] year month day [ hour ]


DESCRIPTION

       The program performs date conversion between the Gregorian Solar
       Calendar (SC) and the Chinese Lunar Calendar (LC).  Given a date in
       either calendar, the program also outputs the corresponding "shengxiao"
       (animal of the year) and "ganzhi" characters.  The date range currently
       covered is from about 1900 A.D. to 2049 A.D.

       For the sake of convenience, we choose the convention such that the
       solar and lunar year numbers of the first day of a lunar year are the
       same.  For example, SC 1991.2.15 is LC 1991.1.1, while SC 1991.2.14 is
       LC 1990.12.30.  Moreover, we choose the convention such that the solar
       and lunar hour numbers (in 24-hour clock) of a date are the same,
       although a lunar day starts at 23:00 of a solar day. This means that SC
       1991.2.15.23 is LC 1991.1.2.23, while SC 1991.2.16.0 is LC 1991.1.2.0,
       and SC 1991.2.16.1 is LC 1991.1.2.1.

       The standard time of the Lunar Calendar is Beijing (Hong Kong) Standard
       Time, not GMT.  Be sure to adjust appropriately for other time zones
       and "Day-light Saving Time".

       In the Lunar Calendar, a normal year has 12 months, and a leap year
       (run-nian) has 13 months, where the extra month is called a "leap
       month" (run-yue).  For example, the leap month that follows immediately
       the 6-th lunar month is called the 6-th leap month.  A (leap) month is
       either a short or long one, which has 29 or 30 days respectively.

       There are 10 gan's and 12 zhi's.  The ganzhi labeling of the year,
       month, day and hour of a date is a member of the Cartesian product
       GxGxGxG, where G = {1,2,...,60}.  For example, "jia-zi" is 1, "yi-chou"
       is 2, and so on.  The ganzhi of the j-th leap month is the same as that
       of the j-th month.

       The possible options are

       -b     output ganzhi in special "bitmap" characters.

       -h     output hanzi or Simplified Chinese characters encoded in
              (highest-bit-set) GB code.

       -5     output Traditional Chinese characters encoded in (highest-bit-
              set) BIG5 code.

       -i     convert a lunar date to solar date.  The default is to convert a
              solar date to a lunar date.

       -l     indicate the month is a lunar leap month.  This option is
              meaningful only when the "-i" option is used.


COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992    Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung

       All rights reserved.  Permission to copy and distribute verbatim copies
       of the source code and accompanied documents for non-commercial
       purposes is granted, but changing them is not allowed.  There is
       absolutely no warranty for this program.


AUTHORS

       Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

       The special "bitmap" file "lunar.bitmap" was contributed by Weimin Liu.

       Special thanks to Hwei Chen Ti who extended the tables from 2001 to
       2049.


BUGS

       Bug reports and comments should be sent to Ricky.Yeung@Eng.Sun.Com or
       lee@umunhum.stanford.edu.


DISCLAIMER

       This software has no connection with our employers.

                                 23 July 1992                         lunar(1)

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