Date: Mon, 14 Feb 94 09:40:09 EST From: ado@elsie.nci.nih.gov (Arthur David Olson) ...does POSIX *require* that the above rules be written... without the "+1200" modifier to the zone name that will appear in user-visible output? No. Posix 1003.1-1990 section 8.1.1 page 153 lines 75-78 requires that the offset be one or two digits, no more and no less. So if you specify TZ='GMT+1200' you are outside the scope of the standard, and the implementation is free to do what it likes. However, it's confusing for TZ='GMT+12:00' to mean something entirely different from TZ='GMT+1200'. Posix says the former means ``we're 12 hours behind GMT and our time zone is named "GMT"''; my proposed change makes the latter mean ``we're 12 hours _ahead_ of GMT and our time zone is named "GMT+1200"''. The fundamental problem is that the user interface (Posix TZ strings) uses a different sign than the TZ package. Sorry, I don't offhand see a clean fix for this.