How do you generate POSIX time zone strings?

[Tony Glenning]

Hi,

I am hoping this is the correct alias for this question (apologies of not).

I am trying to find a straight forward way to generate POSIX time zone
strings for the current year. For example, if this function were run
on machine which has TZ set to US/Pacific in 1997 it would generate:

	PST8PDT7,97/3:00:00,300/1:00:00

Any suggestions welcome. Currently my best thought is parsing the zoneinfo
files and generating them that way, which is quite tedious.

Thanks,
Tony