Re: Daylight Savings Time problem

[keelings@wu1.wl.aecl.ca (S. Keeling)]

	Following the discussion here about setting the system date
(thanks people), I decided to take the profferred advice and do it;
set my machine's hardware clock to utc.  Be advised that my system is
loaded with a Slackware distribution at the moment, but that should be
irrelevant for this discussion.

	I read /usr/lib/zoneinfo/time.doc, and the "date" man page,
and I've been through all this a few times before.  However:

  516  date -u -s 0413150496
  517  date -s 041315061996:00
  518  date -u --set 041315081996:00
  519  date 041315061996:00
  520  date 41315061996:00
  522  date -s 041315111996:00 --utc
  523  date --date=041315111996:00 --utc
  524  date --date=1996:00 --utc
  525  date -u -s 041315251996:00
  526  date -u 041315261996:00
  527  date -u -s 0413152796

	It kept reporting "illegal date format" or something.  This is
where I got thoroughly frustrated, and in desperation tried a "date
-u", followed by stuffing that output into a "date -u -s" command:

  529  date -u -s 'Sat Apr 13 15:31:00 UTC 1996'
  532  clock -u -w

	It worked!  Finally!

	Can anyone tell me what was wrong with line 516?  Is there
some small syntactical gotcha that I'm missing here?  Was it quoting
the date string that did it?  Why?  The man page mentions nothing
about that.

/etc/rc.d_ date --version
date - GNU sh-utils 1.12

	I'm going to upgrade to Debian as soon as I can afford a new
disk and tape drive.

-- 

   keelings@wl.aecl.ca       s. keeling,   aecl - whiteshell labs