On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Arthur David Olson wrote:
I recently added time zone support to our product, and life would have been easier if the time zone files had their file name in them so that they 'knew' what they were.
How come they don't?
Some files have multiple names (as established by "Link" directives).
One name could be blessed as the canonical name, and that could be embedded in the file. People sometimes want to know: What string could be stored in the TZ environment variable on this computer to cause it to use the time zone that is the default (described by /etc/localtime or similar) on some other computer? If /etc/localtime is a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Foo/Bar, then the name "Foo/Bar" can easily be extracted from that, but if it's a copy instead of a symlink then I don't know of any easy answer. --apb (Alan Barrett)