Just a brief note on history; Robert points out, quite correctly, that the 4BSD timezone() function, use of ftime, and so on, all date back to V7. I just wanted to point out that the System V convention of the external variables "timezone" and "daylight" date back to V6, essentially untouched. V6 did not have ftime, the TZ environment variable (or environments at all), nor tzset. I'm not sure how it knew the local time zone; I don't believe the date command, or any other piece of software, produced a time zone name, but I think timezone and daylight were statically compiled into libc, and you had to relink the system if you installed it anywhere except the USA Eastern zone. Thus, the conflict between the timezone external integer, and the timezone function, seems to have been introduced by Bell Labs 127 group, sometime between V6 and V7. This conflict will make life interesting for any implementations striving for upward compatiblity with both systems. As far as I am able to determine, neither X3J11 nor POSIX requires either, but of course the SVID requires the integer. This suggests that it would be nice if Berkeley phased out the function. Mark