UTC aka Coordinated Universal Time, is the "right now is right now for all of us" time, and is coordinated among several entities, irregardless of the timezone the parties are in. GMT is a timezone with an offset of zero. All timezones are differentials off of UTC; you couldn't just say that in parts of England, you don't have a timezone - everyone has a timezone. So GMT exists with an offset of zero.

To some people it's just semantics, to others it has great importance. I think it's only important to know the difference. But then, I work overnights and don't really care that the sun should come up "sooner" during summer months, or what day of the week it is.

I think the man page as it stands is fine if the quote below is accurate - display or set the time without a zone adjustment.

Pierre

Markus Bergkvist wrote:
So, the man page should say 'Display the UTC in GMT time'?

If I understand it correctly, UTC is the timezone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#UTC

/Markus

Pierre Lamy wrote:
GMT is the timezone, UTC is the time.

P

jared r r spiegel wrote:
On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 06:17:58PM -0400, Nick ! wrote:
On 4/10/07, Markus Bergkvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi,

'date -u' on a 4.0 -stable will give something like
Tue Apr 10 22:03:24 GMT 2007
but shouldn't it be
Tue Apr 10 22:03:24 UTC 2007
UTC = GMT for all that we care about.
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time]]
  i could be wrong here, but perhaps he is not suggesting
  that there is any wallclock difference between GMT and UTC,
  but rather that the manpage for date(1) says:

---
-u Display or set the date in UTC (Coordinated Universal) time.
---

  as opposed to "... date in GMT ...", also as implied by how it is
  '-u' and not '-g'

  least, that was my reaction to his post?

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