What time is it?

[Steve Holmes]

Your e-mail's time stamp also reflects the eastern time zone as well.
If this TZ environment variable is set when you login with a startup
file like .profile does it make any difference? I also wonder how your
hardware clock is set (UTC or local time)? I assume if this box is
strictly linux, you would be using UTC; I just ask this wondering if
it might impact how the TZ environment variable behaves.

Wow! I just shelled out of composing this message to mess around with
the TZ variable on my slackware box and was I in for a treet!:) When I
first echoed the variable, I thought it was blank (my machine is set
for localtime instead of UTC because I dual boot.) I kept getting
times 7 hours ahead of our current time until I set the TZ to MST to
get local time appearing.  Might want to play with the hwclock command
a bit, perhaps that might have to be set each time one changes time
zones.  I also looked in /usr/share/zoneinfo and found a symbolic link
to /etc/localtime; the base name of this link is also called
localtime.  Inspecting this file revealed that it was a binary file
but it seemed to look like the binary file called MST in this zoneinfo
directory.  Right now, I don't know exactly how this plays into the
whole time setting business but wonder if this would have to be
changed every time you change timezones.  Maybe everything eoesn't
look at the TZ variable like we expect it to.

Sorry for so much rambling here but this looks like an interesting
question and an opportunity to confuse others with a convoluted answer:).

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 10:50:46PM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> I'm one of those folks who likes to set her bash prompt in a particular
> way. My [particular thing is to have the time provided in the prompt.
> Ofr course, that's only the time as of when the command prompt is
> returned, but that is actually helpful to me. In part, I like this
> because I travel a good deal, and it's useful to have the current local
> time displayed frequently.
> 
> Problem is, it doesn't work. It used to, but no longer, and I don't know
> exactly when or how it got broken.
> 
> Some facts:
> 
> I'm running Red Hat 8.0 (fully updated). That's bash version:
> 
> GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
> I have the following prompt string defined:
> 
> PS1="[\u@\h \t] \W\\\$"
> 
> And, indeed, this displays the current time. But, it doesn't track time
> zone changes. For example, I'm currently writing from L.A., so I have:
> 
> export "TZ=US/Pacific" #Pacific Time
> 
> 
> And, indeed, issuing the 'date' command reflects this:
> 
> Mon Feb 17 19:19:38 PST 2003
> [janina at toccata 22:19:38] janina$
> 
> But, as you can plainly see, the prompt comes back in Eastern Time, not
> Pacific. What's wrong? How do I fix it?
> 
> Or, am I supposed to stay home and not miss blizzards?? <grin>
> 
> 
> -- 
> 	
> 				Janina Sajka, Director
> 				Technology Research and Development
> 				Governmental Relations Group
> 				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
> 
> Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175
> 
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