Codeux/Textual — Issue #182: /uptime add-on
Author: Specimen
Created: 2012-03-06 22:36:46+00:00
State: open

Output Example:
"System Uptime: 1 Month, 2 Days, 18 Hours, 4 Minutes, 51 Seconds - Textual Uptime: 5 Hours, 3 Minutes, 2 Seconds"

/uptime reports system and textual uptime in a rather awkward way. When the values are larger than 7 days, it's starts measuring in weeks, days, etc. And if they are larger than about 30 days (depending on the month) it starts measuring in months, weeks, etc.
'Uptime' (when the value is large than 24 hours) usually is reported in days even if the value is bigger than 30 days, it's uncommon to refer it in months or weeks. That's what one gets when running the terminal command 'uptime', or how System Profiler reports 'Time since boot', or how the popular iStat widget reports uptime.

Reporting uptime in months has the added fuzzyness that months have a varying number of days, the way the /uptime command retrieves this data is that it contextualizes to month the uptime occurred, example:

/uptime output:
"System Uptime: 1 Month, 2 Days, 18 Hours, 4 Minutes, 51 Seconds - Textual Uptime: 5 Hours, 3 Minutes, 2 Seconds"

Terminal.app, uptime output:
22:25 up 31 days, 18:04, 2 users, load averages: 0,31 0,30 0,33

So, 1 month in this case is 29 days, because most of the uptime occurred in February, although this awareness seems smart, it's very confusing, it's not intuitive at all.

Also, if one looks at how the system command outputs uptime (up 31 days, 18:04) is much more simpler, much more easily readable, much more precise, and doesn't leave any doubts.