good news; missing person

[seismo!hplabs!hpfcla!hpfclj!hpfcdg!rgt]

>>		   ... there's "always" (supposed to be) a TZ environment
>> variable in System V systems.
>
>That's what I thought, too.  But because people were not setting the
>correct time before coming up multi-user, on a System V Rev 2 V 2.0,
>I put the little rc (bcheckrc?) that sets the date as the last thing
>before a single-user shell, as well as the first thing after.  Now I
>get calls that the time is not set properly by this ... I haven't yet
>investigated this properly, but it seems that the TZ is lacking here
>somewhere.

The  correct  place to set TZ is in init.  I have toyed with the idea of
adding a new type of line to inittab which can be used to set TZ in init
so that all of init's children can know about TZ.

Note however that this will never  completely cure the problem, since an
application  may use some of the flavors of exec() which are designed to
drop all  environment  information.  Login  uses such a flavor of exec()
(at least currently on the system that I am using.)  Still, we should be
able   insure  that  TZ  is  defined   everywhere   in  the   underlying
platform/system on which user applications run.

Ron Tolley