According to man hwclock in 7.1 -s means hctosys, so it is not just an abbreviation, but just an option left over for compatibility reasons.
Thanks for that info, Ole. I take it your hwclock man page is newer/different from mine in SuSE6.3, which is dated: 02 March 1998? It would be nice if they had been updated since then. And hctosys certainly makes sense; I'm tempted to change my boot script to use the long form of the option, just for clarity, although I hate messing with supplied scripts in general. Still, it seems wrong to adjust the hwclock after using it to set the system clock; as my hwclock man page says: ``It is good to do a hwclock --adjust just before the hwclock --hctosys at system startup time, and maybe periodically while the system is running via cron.'' Maybe while I'm changing my boot script, I'll make it do things in that order. Cheers, Jim