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From: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: how to set timezone in BSD
Message-ID: <1990Feb23.174228.5383@smsc.sony.com>
Date: 23 Feb 90 17:42:28 GMT
References: <24337@princeton.Princeton.EDU> <6214@orca.wv.tek.com> <1990Feb22.175400.7713@irscscm>
Reply-To: dce@Sony.COM (David Elliott)
Distribution: na
Organization: Sony Microsystems Corp.
Lines: 36

In article <1990Feb22.175400.7713@irscscm> mlake@irscscm.UUCP (Marshall Lake) writes:
>In article <6214@orca.wv.tek.com> jeff@quark.WV.TEK.COM (Jeff Beadles) writes:
>>
>>SYNOPSIS
>>     date [ -u ] [ -z zone ] [ -d daylight_type ] [
>>     [yy]mmddhhmm[.ss] ]
>>     [ +format ]
>
>The date command on my BSD system doesn't have the -z option.  I'm
>only 4.2 though.

I believe that Jeff is running UTek, which is a variant of BSD, not
plain BSD.

Back in the early days of UTek, long before elsie!ado developed the
zoneinfo package, we needed a way to allow customers to set the
timezone on their local systems.  It was not acceptable to have people
reconfigure their systems, as binary reconfigurable kernels were not
yet common (even if we had them, we had 40MB disk systems to support,
so sources, compilers, and even some commands, were optional).

So, we opted for modifying the date command to have it set the
timezone.  As I recall, /etc/rc.local (or whatever we used for this
kind of stuff) looked for a file with the timezone name in it, and ran
date to set the timezone to this value.

For compatability, it wasn't a great move, but in those days it was
more important to be able to have more features (HP-UX was the big
competitor for us) than to be compatible with other systems (of which
there were very few).

-- 
David Elliott
dce@smsc.sony.com | ...!{uunet,mips}!sonyusa!dce
(408)944-4073
"...it becomes natural, like a third sense." -- Homer Simpson