the time problem i was having before (fast clock) had seemed to be irreproducible. however just now, i noticed the following odd behaviour:
fiddle% date -u
Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 GMT 1970
fiddle% cat /dev/time
0 0 0
1 fiddle%
fiddle% # wait a few seconds
fiddle% cat /dev/time
0 0 0
1 fiddle%
the clock is completely stopped!
(although sleep doesn't sleep forever - sleep 10 sleeps
for about 3.43 seconds, so *something* has a concept of time)
most odd.
