On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 02:30:08AM +0000, mike.junk.46@att.net wrote: > Of the 780 files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/ America/Chicago and > CST6CDT are the only two that might apply to me [...] > [...] if there is any use for them after one's own time zone is set. Suppose a hacker logs into your computer from far, far away, say from somewhere in Nepal. Surely you'd want this person to see the time adapted to their locale? That's the least courtesy you can be expected to provide? ;-P Now putting my tongue out of my cheek again: in Unix, a computer "has" no time zone or language -- people have those. And since, again in Unix, several people can be logged in [1] at the same time, it's up to the user's environment [2] to decide on time zone, language, etc. This concept is surprising at first coming from other cultures, where Microsoft was happy to sell you another complete version of Windows if you wanted your computer to talk to you, e.g. Portuguese (and yet another for Brazilian Portuguese, greedy as they are). Of course, Microsoft has caught up (they are trying since the mid-90s), but not without some spectacular messups. Remember that one where (I think it was Windows 95), while trying to automate the spring DST transition were spotted dithering endlessly between 2AM and 3AM? Unix has had this abstraction always: there's the internal time, and there's the time shown to the user, which depends on the user. There's the error itself, and there's the error message shown to the user. And so on. Cheers [1] This concept extends to other remote communication things, like http. [2] See man 7 locale for the gory details - t
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