... 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. Joe Yao jsdy@hadron.COM (not yet domainised) hadron!jsdy@{seismo.CSS.GOV,dtix.ARPA,decuac.DEC.COM} {arinc,att,avatar,cos,decuac,dtix,ecogong,kcwc}!hadron!jsdy {netex,netxcom,rlgvax,seismo,smsdpg,sundc}!hadron!jsdy