Contents of /etc/TIMEZONE file

From: Aharon Schkolnik <aharon_at_healdb.matat.health.gov.il>
Date: 13 Oct 1996 11:18:25 +0200

Hi.

I'm using a perl module which needs to determine my timezone. It first
tests the variable TZ, if that is not defined, it checks of
/etc/TIMEZONE exists, if so, it does:

grep ^TZ /etc/TIMEZONE


Now, my /etc/TIMEZONE file is empty, which causes the above grep to
return nil, which causes the perl program to fail. Of course, one
could expect the perl program to check if it gets something reasonable
back from the grep, but that is not the point, because if
/etc/TIMEZONE doesn't exist, it uses GMT, which is not correct.

So, my questions are:

1. should /etc/TIMEZONE be empty, and if not, what should it contain.

2. how do I set TZ to the " correct vaule". By this I mean, if I do
date, I get

Sun Oct 13 11:09:09 IST 1996


which correctly shows IST. Thus, the system knows that my timezone is
IST. In order to get the perl program to also know this, I must either
get this info into /etc/TIMEZONE, or into TZ. Of course, I realize
that I can simply put TZ=IST;export TZ into my .profile (that's what
I'm doing now), but I do not want to require each user on my system to
do that - it should be set on a system level.

I just noticed that /etc/profile contains the line
. /etc/TIMEZONE. Does that mean that I should put the command

TZ=IST;export TZ

in /etc/TIMEZONE ?

If so, how do I do that for all the different shells ?

Otherwise, do I have to put the correct command in each shells
initialization file (using the appropriate syntax) ?



TIA.

--
  The day is short, and the work is great,     |   Aharon Schkolnik
  and the laborers are lazy, and the reward    |   Aharon_at_Matat.Health.Gov.IL
  is great, and the Master of the house is     |
  impatient. - Ethics Of The Fathers Ch. 2     |
Received on Sun Oct 13 1996 - 11:30:16 NZDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed Nov 08 2023 - 11:53:47 NZDT