Thanks, some thoughts: 1. Lines should ordinarily be at most 80 columns. 2. The header "Link TARGET LINK-NAME" is problematic. First, the terminology isn't clear unless one already knows what Link does. It's easy for a non-expert to misunderstand TARGET to be the link you're trying to build (which it isn't) and LINK-NAME to be the name that you're trying to put into the link (which it's not). The best way to understand the Link directive is to know that it's inspired by the Unix ln command. If you know that, it's clear; if not, the header's not going to save you. Second, let's not bother trying to make the Link columns line up nicely with tabs. They often line up nicely anyway (e.g., all those links from America/Port_of_Spain) and tabs just consume valuable horizontal space. And when they don't always line up (as in 'backward') making them line up puts the columns too far apart anway. In hindsight perhaps we should have just used single spaces in 'backward'. 3. I prefer not having space after '>' in a shell I/O redirection. It's just a style thing, but it's the style in tzselect.ksh. For non-experts, this style makes it clearer that we're not talking greater-than. 4. I'm not a fan of "# Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL]" comments all over the place: they consume screen real estate with little benefit. as those columns are reasonably clear without it. (This is less true for Rule lines.) I've left these comments in existing files for the sake of stability, but in the new file 'backzone' I'd like to try omitting them before each zone. One such comment at the start of the file should be enough. So, how about the attached patch set instead? (I haven't pushed it.)