Description of problem: man 3 tzset as well as /usr/share/doc/tzdata-2008b/Theory describe the format of legal TZ values as: std offset dst [offset],start[/time],end[/time] However that's not how it has works for as long as I can remember (at least Red Hat 7.1). The correct (and POSIX compliant) syntax is: std offset [dst [offset][,start[/time],end[/time]]] (with no spaces). That is: TZ=EST5EDT works correctly as per POSIX but according to the current documentation it should not, and should show UTC time instead. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): man-pages-2.44-1.fc7 tzdata-2008b-1.fc7 glibc-2.6-4 (No problem with this, but it is where I think tzset(3) is defined.) How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. man tzset 2. less /usr/share/doc/tzdate*/Theory 3. unset TZ; date; TZ=EST5EDT date Actual results: (... man page output omitted...) $ unset TZ $ date Tue May 27 23:48:31 EDT 2008 $ TZ=EST5EDT date Tue May 27 23:48:46 EDT 2008 $ TZ=la-dee-da date Wed May 28 03:49:28 2008 Expected results: $ unset TZ $ date Tue May 27 23:48:31 EDT 2008 $ TZ=EST5EDT date Wed May 28 03:48:46 2008 $ TZ=la-dee-da date Wed May 28 03:49:28 2008 Additional info: The current POSIX standard requires TZ to allow quoting of ``std'' and ``dst'' values using less-than and greater-than, as follows: $ TZ='<EST>5<EDT>' date Tue May 27 23:48:31 EDT 2008 However it produces: Tue May 27 23:48:31 <EDT> 2008 While fixing that is probably a different bug, the man page should describe the current usage with a note about the POSIX violation (maybe under the "bugs" section?) URL to SUSv3/POSIX standard for TZ environment variable: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html
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I have confirmed this bug in fedora 9. Will test against F10 ASAP. Note this should be a simple, quick documentation fix.
tzdata portion seems to be fixed (not sure when the fix got in): $ grep stdoffset /usr/share/doc/tzdata-2008i/Theory stdoffset[dst[offset],date[/time],date[/time]] I also looked at the man page, and there they actually describe two formats. First which is only formed by "std offset", and the other that also includes (now mandatory, since it's actually a different format) dst[offset] etc. So that seems to be fixed, too. But I'm reassigning to man page maintainer anyway.
man page is ok now. I'm closing this bug.