Using time zone UTC-5 (or GMT-5, or EST5)

[Bill Davidsen]

Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 04/23/2013 03:31 PM, Bill Davidsen issued this missive:
>> I am getting some data on mountable media, and the device which writes
>> the files runs in EST or whatever you want to call five hours west of
>> Greenwich with no daylight time. The problem is that on a FAT or
>> ISO-9660 filesystem, the date and time seem to all jump an hour during
>> daylight time. Is there a better way to get the time correct than to run
>> a separate system which doesn't use daylight savings?
>>
>> I have tried exporting TZ=EST5 (or EST or UTC-5 or GMT-5) to the mount
>> command or the rsync command, that doesn't seem to help anything, I need
>> the incoming data treated as EST, while the machine is at EST5EDT.
>
> Hopefully you have the "System clock uses UTC" set on your Linux system.
> If so, then all internal timestamps use UTC. They are converted to local
> time when displayed (via "ls" or whatever). Winblows boxes don't do
> that...they use the local time as the timestamp mechanism, so there's
> the rub (also the cause of many issues with dual-booting machines).
>
> You can either set your Linux box to not use UTC as the system clock
> (I don't like that) or just deal with the idiocy that is Windows. It's
> your system and your call.

No Windows involved, just some data logging machinery which writes info in VFAT 
or ISO-9660 formats depending on the nmodel. But no daylight changes on the big 
boxes, I just have to make the data be local time for reports and comparison. 
The simple way is to run EST on the system which reads to data into Linux. Linux 
is a tad too smart here.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot