In discovering that PDT is not the right way to spell the timezone in the TZ environment variable, I discovered that on a Debian Sarge system with GNU date, bogus timezone names get copied to the output, with the time printed in GMT, leading one to a false sense that one has entered a correct timezone name:
sell-me-down-the-river:~$ date Mon Jul 11 17:03:09 EDT 2005 sell-me-down-the-river:~$ TZ=HST date Mon Jul 11 11:03:17 HST 2005 sell-me-down-the-river:~$ TZ=PDT date Mon Jul 11 21:03:24 PDT 2005 sell-me-down-the-river:~$ TZ=completelybogusnonexistanttimezone date Mon Jul 11 21:03:36 completelybogusnonexistanttimezone 2005 sell-me-down-the-river:~$ By contrast, NetBSD's date tells you that you're in GMT when doing this: xanthine:~$ date Mon Jul 11 17:13:27 EDT 2005 xanthine:~$ TZ=HST date Mon Jul 11 11:13:31 HST 2005 xanthine:~$ TZ=PDT date Mon Jul 11 21:13:36 GMT 2005 xanthine:~$ TZ=completelybogusnonexistanttimezone date Mon Jul 11 21:13:49 GMT 2005 xanthine:~$ This might well be more of a glibc issue than a date issue, though; I'm not really sure. I also find it rather confusing that date will in some circumstances print PDT as the timezone, leading me to suspect that PDT is a valid value for the TZ variable when it apparently actually isn't: sell-me-down-the-river:~$ TZ=PST8PDT date Mon Jul 11 14:16:25 PDT 2005 sell-me-down-the-river:~$ _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
