On 2024-12-08 14:42, Arthur Olson via tz wrote:
I could make an argument for: with TZ set to Etc/Unknown (or any other unfathomable value), some obnoxiously wrong results are best seen; a time zone abbreviation of ERR has been suggested as a possibility in the past.
In other places TZDB currently uses the abbreviation "-00" to indicate invalid TZ settings. However, it neglects to use "-00" in the situation you mention. Fixed in the attached proposed patch.
Side note, brought to mind by /etc/tty and /dev/tty: if TZ is "-", should the time zone information be read from the standard input? :-)
This is related to Brian's comment about "zdump <(...)", where further thought is needed. I suspect we'll need to distinguish 'zdump "-"' (where reading from stdin could be useful) from TZ="-" (where we surely don't want a program to read from standard input merely because it wants the time of day and someone used a squirrelly TZ string).