FW: Time Zone question

[Guy Harris]

>    From:	Dodhiawala, Rajendra [SMTP:raj.dodhiawala at cacheflow.com]
>    Sent:	Tuesday, February 15, 2000 4:42 PM
> 
>    - What is a good way to display time such that TZ info is absolutely clear.
> 
> I'd use the value of the TZ environment variable.
> 
> It might be helpful to canonicalize it, e.g. replace
> 'US/Pacific' with
> 'America/Los_Angeles', and replace
> 'CET-1CEST-2,M3.5.0/02:00,M10.5.0/03:00' with
> 'CET-1CEST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0/3', but that would take some work.
> 
>    Is there any standard for this or precedence on how this is handled
>    in current (popular?) operating systems.
> 
> zdump -v outputs TZ's value.

On some platforms.

On others, not:

	tooting$ uname -sr 
	SunOS 5.5.1
	tooting$ zdump
	tooting$ zdump -v
	tooting$ 

and, perhaps more relevant to somebody at CacheFlow:

	ecco*> version
	NetApp Release 5.3.4R3: Thu Jan 27 12:08:07 PST 2000
	ecco*> zdump
	zdump not found.  Type '?' for a list of commands
	ecco*> zdump -v
	zdump not found.  Type '?' for a list of commands
	ecco*> timezone
	Current time zone is US/Pacific

(Yes, it could have been set to America/Los_Angeles; whoever configured
that filer didn't do so, perhaps because they're still used to the old
names - those being, as far as I can tell, the only ones Solaris
supports, at least as of 2.6, that being the newest Solaris release we
have here.)

I.e., we're not running UNIX on our products, and they're not running it
on their products either, as far as I know; if they're using the Olson
time zone code on their Web-caching appliances, as we are on our file
server and Web-caching appliances, there's probably some mechanism by
which they can fetch the name of the current time zone, even if they,
like we, have no notion of environment variables.