Hey folks ... meant to answer this question last week, but here is a doc i found at the Sun web site: Hope it helps. -----Original Message----- From: Keith Wright [mailto:kwright@gis.net] Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 8:25 PM To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Subject: Re: [Wlug] Unix Timezone Settings Did anybody answer this? I didn't see it. Just to show cc.noyes that we aren't ignoring em, I guess I'd better answer even though I don't know.

From: "cc.noyes" <vze284qe@verizon.net>

Some Unix's (SCO Unixware for one...) uses a timezone setting in /etc/TZ. What's the relationship between the timezone setting and the local time? I assume the timezone is set to the local timezone (in our case GMT+5 or US/EASTERN), but what about setting the local time?

Don't know /etc/TZ. Yes, the timezone is the difference between local civil time and Universal Coordinated Time, abbreviated UTC to please the French, who refused to call it Greenwich Mean Time. What do you mean by setting local time? I have never done anything I would describe that way.

Should I set it to GMT and let the timezone offset make the adjustment to the correct local time, or do I set the local time to the correct local time? And if I do that, what's the purpose of the timezone setting? I can't find where Linux uses a timezone setting.

Set local time to GMT? Sounds wrong---what could it mean? Maybe you are talking about the CMOS clock on a ``standard'' ``IBM'' ``PC''. I set that in the BIOS to UTC. The TZ environment variable gives the name of the local timezone for each user, so that if people are logged on from around the world, they all get times displayed in their own local time. I think the default time zone is set in the boot scripts, which vary between distributions. There may also be a default default set when you compile the C library. What?---You don't compile your own C library before you build a kernel? RedHat, at least, asks you questions about where you live when you install the OS Try man date man hwclock man tzset man tzfile http://www.iers.org for more than you want to know. -- -- Keith Wright <kwright@free-comp-shop.com> Programmer in Chief, Free Computer Shop <http://www.free-comp-shop.com> --- Food, Shelter, Source code. --- _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug