Default time zone for a location (previously Europe/London)

Paul Eggert eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU
Tue Sep 5 17:21:32 UTC 2006


"Olson, Arthur David \(NIH/NCI\) [E]" <olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov> writes:

> In the 64-bit versions of the time zone data files, all files end with a
> line of text that's either blank (rarely) or is a POSIX-style time-zone
> specifier for future times; judicious use of "tail -1" and "sed" in a
> shell script can produce a list of time zone abbreviations.

It's not a text file, right?  So "tail -1" is a bit dubious, as POSIX
1003.1-2004 <http://www.opengroup.org/susv3/utilities/tail.html> says
that the input to "tail" must be a text file unless -c is specified.

Also, this is more controversial, but POSIX says portable scripts are
supposed to use "tail -n 1" rather than "tail -1".  There are a few
implementations that don't support the obsolete "tail -1" form.



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