Re: date and UTC and GMT odd behaviour

[Paul Eggert]

"Mike 'Mike' Jones" <address@hidden> writes:

> A little bit of trial-and-error and I find that the anomaly is limited to
> between 6pm, 23 Jun 1968 GMT and 2am, 31 Oct 1971:

Good detective work.  This is a bug that stems from the fact that
Great Britain was at UTC+1 for that entire period.  The bug is
triggered if your local time zone is British time (e.g.,
TZ='Europe/London'), which probably explains why Andreas Schwab didn't
reproduce it in Nuremburg.

The bug is fixed in coreutils CVS.  For coreutils 5.3.0 and earlier, a
simple workaround is to set TZ='UTC0' in the environment before
invoking "date".

Also, as Andreas mentioned, the syntax "date address@hidden" is more reliable,
if your coreutils version is sufficiently new to support it (5.3.0 or
later).