On 09/27/2011 03:09 PM, Sandro Santilli wrote: > I've been puzzled by date(1) giving weird results > when setting TZ to values unknown by zoneinfo. > > As far as: > > $ TZ=Fake date > Tue Sep 27 14:06:32 Fake 2011
Yes, that is per POSIX. One can specify info about the timezone in TZ like TZ="Fake+6", so one couldn't start warning about that. > It would be more helpful if the command raised an error > or warning about "unknown" timezones rather than giving > random dates. > > It's particularly anonying when the same TZ _reported_ > by the command isn't recognized in input: > > $ date > Tue Sep 27 16:08:13 CEST 2011 > > $ TZ=CEST date > Tue Sep 27 14:08:13 CEST 2011 > > Thanks for making a clock available for everyone, btw :) Wow you learn something everyday. I thought the TZ=XYZ was just treated as UTC+0 to allow one to specify TZ=XYZ+4 etc. as an offset from UTC. But in fact some TZ values are matched, as can be seen for CET here on my system: $ TZ=CEST date Tue Sep 27 18:03:05 CEST 2011 $ TZ=CET date Tue Sep 27 20:03:09 CEST 2011 $ date Tue Sep 27 19:03:17 IST 2011 There are a few three letter codes on my system at /usr/share/zoneinfo/ (maybe these are the only non ambiguous ones?) Hmm, how about we warn if an unmatched code (without a /) is specified, without any other info like UTC offset etc.? cheers, Pádraig.
