A theme in everything Paul is saying is that time zone abbreviations are generally a bad idea and you ideally should just not use them. They were never particularly well-defined, and people always think they mean things other than they actually do. ISO 8601 recommends expressing times with just the offset from UTC and avoiding all of these abbreviations, including the new-style ones. Either date -R (for an RFC 2822 Date), date -Iseconds (for an ISO 8601 date and time) or any strftime string with %z will give you that offset. This is really how times should be expressed everywhere. These time zone abbreviations have to be provided because POSIX requires the field exist for backward compatibility reasons, but as with two-digit years (also supported in numerous places by POSIX), they're best avoided completely. If you want to convey someone's physical location, using the time zone for this is ambiguous, problematic, and mostly doesn't work. There are numerous other ways of designating this, from simply stating the location to using actual coordinates. The time should not be doing double-duty. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>