BST Solution Worked Fine.
I was the one who wanted to record a couple of radio
shows from the BBC and not have to remember to juggle chrontab
files for the several weeks when the US is using DST and the
UK isn't. This occurs in the last week of October each autumn
and for around 4 weeks in March.
I have an old Del Optiplex that is mainly used as a
terminal to get in to other unix systems so I set that system to
/Europe/London time rules and then set chron jobs based on
British time. These chron jobs are just ssh commands to another
old Del Dimension that has more disk space and memory to
actually do the recording.
Since last weekend was the UK's time change, I checked
and was pleased to see that everything worked.
There are more elegant ways to do this, of course. If
one has a monster installation with multiple gigabytes of RAM
and suitable processor capabilities, one could run a bunch of
small virtual machines, just enough for a Linux installation and
a few megs of space for chron and have those virtual systems set
to different time zones as you needed them.
If you look this topic up in Google, you do see various
clever things people have tried to have part of their system
pretend to be somewhere else, but that /etc/localtime rule set
truly rules.
One idea I thought of would be an extra field in
chrontab specifically for time zone information but that would
certainly add to chron's complexity so I am certainly not
complaining. I have been using unix of one flavor or other since
1989 or 1990 and think it is one of the best tool kits ever.
Martin
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