lunar(1)						      General Commands Manual							  lunar(1)

NAME

       lunar (version 2.2) - a calendar conversion utility

SYNTAX

       lunar [ -h ] [ -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 "Daylight 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 Chinese characters encoded in (highest-bit-set) GB 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, 2001 Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung

       This  program  is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY	WARRANTY;  without  even  the  implied	warranty  of  MER-
       CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

       You  should  have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
       Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

       The last version of this program was released on July 23, 1992 as version 2.1a.	This program was first released under the terms of GNU GPL
       on October 28, 2001 as version 2.2. Both versions are identical except for the license text.

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 lee@umunhum.stanford.edu.

DISCLAIMER

       This software has no connection with our employers.

								  28 October 2001							  lunar(1)