On 03/23/2016 04:13 PM, Matt Johnson wrote:
Etc/GMT-4 would be the most generic form. (note the inverted sign is deliberate)
Yes, that works. I omitted 'Etc/GMT-4' mainly because its time zone abbreviation can be confusing. On my system: $ TZ='Etc/GMT-4' date Thu Mar 24 03:58:03 GMT-4 2016 $ TZ='AZT-4' date Thu Mar 24 03:58:03 AZT 2016 $ TZ='Asia/Baku' date Thu Mar 24 03:58:03 AZT 2016 $ date -u Wed Mar 23 23:58:03 UTC 2016 The confusion comes because in typical English usage 'GMT-4' often means 4 hours behind GMT. My impression is that the Etc/* zones are best avoided in applications that use time zone abbreviations.
AZT-4 will work for POSIX compliant systems, but not necessarily with all systems. I'm not 100% sure but I don't think it would work in Java, for example.
Yes, that's right. In Java one could use "GMT+04:00"; this is a different syntax than POSIX TZ syntax, with the opposite sign among other things.So in practice a string like'Asia/Dubai' should be a more-portable workaround, as this should work on any platform where 'Asia/Baku' works (albeit with the abbreviation 'GST', which is a bit of a stretch but still better than 'GMT-4').