I've been watching the discussion on minuteswest vs minuteseast, and there's a point that I haven't seen brought up yet. The math is a bit less confusing if you use minuteseast. I modified date(1) to allow setting the timezone to any number of minutes west of GMT you want. It was a bit confusing typing "date -z 2:15" and having date print out something like "Fri Feb 20 20:00:00 GMT-2:15 1987". (Notice the sign change!) Turns out that if you take the time in GMT and add minutesEAST, you get the correct time for your zone. west GMT east wall clock time 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 minuteswest/60 2 1 0 -1 -2 minuteseast/60 -2 -1 0 1 2 Other than the pain of converting existing software, it appears that minuteseast is a better choice. ----------------- Also, does anyone know the correct timezone names for Australia? The following is from 4.3 timezone.c: -10*60, "EST", "EST", /* Aust: Eastern */ -10*60+30, "CST", "CST", /* Aust: Central */ -8*60, "WST", 0, /* Aust: Western */ It seems a bit odd to be that there is no indication of daylight time (e.g. EDT, CDT) except for the western zone, which gives "GMT+8:00" during their summer. I find it hard to believe that the Australians refer to their timezone as "GMT+8:00". Snoopy tektronix!doghouse.gwd!snoopy snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com