...

... there's "always" (supposed to be) a TZ environment variable in System V systems.

That's what I thought, too. But because people were not setting the correct time before coming up multi-user, on a System V Rev 2 V 2.0, I put the little rc (bcheckrc?) that sets the date as the last thing before a single-user shell, as well as the first thing after. Now I get calls that the time is not set properly by this ... I haven't yet investigated this properly, but it seems that the TZ is lacking here somewhere.

The correct place to set TZ is in init. I have toyed with the idea of adding a new type of line to inittab which can be used to set TZ in init so that all of init's children can know about TZ. Note however that this will never completely cure the problem, since an application may use some of the flavors of exec() which are designed to drop all environment information. Login uses such a flavor of exec() (at least currently on the system that I am using.) Still, we should be able insure that TZ is defined everywhere in the underlying platform/system on which user applications run. Ron Tolley