Q: how to handle switch to daylight savings time in System V.2?

[Tim Olson]

In article <265 at tree.UUCP> stever at tree.UUCP (Steve Rudek) writes:
| What is the proper way to handle daylight savings time under System V?
| When the Big Day came and the date command didn't automatically handle the
| adjustment and I couldn't find any documentation on how to handle the change
| I elected to just reboot the computer and adjust the hardware clock.  That got
| the "date" command to work okay but created a problem with compiled programs
| which use code such as:

It also messes up makes, etc.

| The .profile and .cshrc files set the environment variable "TZ" to "PST8PDT".
| The PST must stand for 'Pacific Standard Time' and the 8 is apparently the
| hour offset from GMT.  But what is the PDT for?  'Pacific Daylight Time'?
| Where is this documented, anyway?  Obviously it is unreasonable to expect AT&T
| to properly index their documentation until UNIX is more than 20 years old and
| produces more than a billion in annual revenue.

One "simple" fix is to change the global .profile TZ to "PST7" for a
week or so, then when the old daylight savings time rule has kicked in,
change the variable back to PST8PDT.


	-- Tim Olson
	Advanced Micro Devices
	(tim at amd.com)