And it isn't necessary to use tztab at all. Leave it alone and simply create the TZ variable you need in /etc/TIMEZONE. The details are in man environ which will tell you how to create any timezone behavior you want (and any name you might want to use). For instance, I have decided to create a timezone for my desk at work. I have decided that it should be 5 hours, 37 minutes and 12 seconds west of Zulu time (or Prime Meridian as the man page states). I also (arbitrarily) decided that daylight saving starts on the 64th day of the year (zero based) and goes back to standard time on day 290. To test it, I set TZ tempoarily like this:
# TZ=BILL+5:37:12BILLD+6:12:43,64,290 date
Thu Jul 21 18:02:07 BILLD 2011
# date
Thu Jul 21 20:14:51 EDT 2011
Now my local time is Eastern Daylight Saving (EDT), but when I override TZ, then date (and all other time related comands like ls -l) will show my special (but very impractical) timezone. Left to right, the components are:
BILL = standard time name (3 or more characters)
+5:37:12 = offset (west) of Zulu time 5 hours 37 minutes and 12 seconds
BILLD =daylight saving time name (any 3 or more characters)
+6:12:43 = offset during daylight saving period
64,290 = start daylight saving on day 64, standard time on day 290
So you determine the rules for your timezone, then edit /etc/TIMEZONE and change it to your local timezone:
TZ=BILL+5:37:12BILLD+6:12:43,64,290
export TZ
But wait, there's more! If your system accomodates users from different timezones, you can add the desired TZ variable to the user's .profile so every user can see time represented in their local timezone. Remember that all time in HP-UX is kept as Zulu or UTC. The TZ variable is used to translate time to the local representation.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
