Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > >> Demonstrate printing a time modified by TZ instead. > > Congrats, you found a documentation bug. > > Apparently, the rdate(8) program supports the TZ environment variable, > but the manual page does not say so. An ENVIRONMENT section is missing > and should be added. It is not a good idea to give EXAMPLES for stuff > that is accidentally undocumented.
I have no idea where you come to this conclusion. TZ isn't supported by the program. Rather it is supported by libc. This program happens to call libc functionality which is mandated to honour the environment variable, but so what? TZ is fundamental, all time_t to text translations use TZ, it is unavoidable and intrinsic to Unix. Do you intend to add an ENVIRONMENT section documenting TZ to a hundred or so programs which print times? I think it is unsustainable and wasteful effort, obscuring far more important messaging. Digging through the tree.. I see that date(1) documents the trickery that you can do with -l. ssh(1) documents it is handed to .. ok ssh is documenting it incorrectly I think. I see that ls(1) has it documented as doing what you expect. I cannot figure out why it is documented, since it is an obvious part of Unix, and ls isn't doing something special or out of the ordinary. A distracting waste of letters. I do not think programs should document behavioural aspects derived from the system behaviour as a whole, unless that aspect is unique, surprising, or altered by the program.
