The file that pre-defines timezones is called /usrf/lib/tztab and you'll find a good man page for it along with the comments in the file itself. NOTE: timezones (as you are probably well aware) are political, and only loosely based on the rotation of the earth. NTP is a great tool as it can maintain the only time kept in HP-UX (which is UTC, aka GMT) very accurately (to a fraction of one second). It cannot, however, do anything about timezones.
HP-UX uses a variable called TZ to define how to interpret UTC for a local user. The first place to start with timezones is the man page for environ (man environ). You'll see that you can use my own personal tiomezone called BILLH5:33:12 by doing something like this:
TZ=BILLH5:33:12 date
You'll see the time is displayed 5 hours, 33 mins and 12 seconds to the west of GMT and there is no Daylight Saving for summer. Of course, this is only an academic example, but shows that you can define any rule for a local timezone. Just set TZ as required.
The US (like Australia) is changing Daylight Saving rules (remember the part about politics?) so a patch for tztab has been released but since adding your own timezone rules is just a matter of editing tztab, just use the man pages for tztab and environ.
As far as Perl goes, you should have it already installed on your system. Check the version with perl -v (you need 5.xxxx to be current). Note that once you change tztab, the results are immediate. Although tricky to find (man date), if TZ is not set, you get this:
"If TZ is not set or is set to the empty string, its default value is EST5EDT."
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
