I believe the way out of this 'who should do it?' problem is to only place those functions that are uniquely OS-related into POSIX. They are 'time()' and 'stime()'. Our task would then be to decide what arguments they take and what errors are defined. X3J11 should deal with the C library functions -- those in section 3 of some Unix manuals. Additional functions can be created within the domain of X3J11 but these should not be required for POSIX. As Robert Elz and others pointed out, POSIX should be the base on which different language environments may run. Imagine how a program would be written using Pascal's date/time manipulation functions. There probably won't be an asctime() call. The difficult part is how to define how the Posix utilities (eg. date, and ls) use and display dates. This is an issue for one of the POSIX subgroups (dot 2?) not the core group. Bob Devine