-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Monday 2006-10-30 at 08:03 -0600, Stevens wrote:
If Carlos would note in my original reply that I said "... it's all relative", then some sense can be made of this mess about time, clocks, etc.
First of all, any _nix system only knows the time if you tell it what it is (actually, that's true for any puter). The cmos clock on the mb is generally referred to as the hardware clock and can be read with "hwclock -r". In my system the hc value is tested against the settings in /etc/adjtime and the result is presented to the system for use: display, cron, etc. Here's the relative part: the system thinks it is default UTC, but you can have it believe anything. The correct UTC might be 3am but you can have it set to 9pm. All the system will do is apply local time zone offsets from its perceived utc value IF "local" is included in adjtime.
The fact that the "adjtime" file contains the word "local" doesn't affect in any way the the internal, system, or software clock (all names for the same clock), which still maintains UTC, regardless of that file. The "local" or "utc" word in that file means that the CMOS, or Hardware, or Bios clock (all names for the same device) stores local or utc time. It is used only during boot (man hwclock). You are confusing concepts. It is true you can lie to the system and tell it a different hour. Right. But it is a very difficult lie to maintain. For instance, the moment you fire up any network time setting program, it will adjust your clock to UTC, internally - unless you modify the sources of such a program. The internal time is simply a counter storing the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970 (man time). Based on that internal time, when the time is displayed to the user, the local time is calculated from the time zone and dsl settings (ie, your locale). You can have many different time zones in use, one for each user of the system. If you set the internal time to something else than UTC, when the time is displayed the system will add to it the displacement known from UTC to Local time - therefore, you will have to give your setup a different time zone than the real one so that the time displayed appears to be correct. No, the internal clock will run UTC. Even if I set it up giving it my local time, it does a calculation and internally sets UTC time. You can not change it unless you modify the kernel sources and many other programs. Did you?
So, don't say that a _nix internal clock is UTC when, in fact, it is whatever you want.
Utterly impossible.
UTC is French for Universal Coordinated Time,
No, it is English for "Coordinated Universal Time". The initials were chosen so that the order is incorrect both in English as in French, on purpose, so that no one could claim that UTC was "theirs". - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFFRh+QtTMYHG2NR9URAtH4AJ0QC3n/N/LT56mj8AtqU9t5/mSqkACffHDA Nl4Bv8W8QLqJ0u4vxtGxE64= =lLk7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----