Date: Can it be specific to a shell??

[John Chambers]

In article <310 at sopwith.UUCP>, snoopy at sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy) writes:
> In article <17 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
> 
> |Unfortunately, Berkeley systems haven't generally adopted this approach.
> |BSD systems still store the timezone in the kernel, and many programs
> |use the kernel's idea of the timezone regardless of anything in the 
> |user's environment.
> 
> You want the system to have its own idea of the timezone, for things
> like uucp.  You do not want uucp looking at the user's TZ.

I'm not sure I agree, but let's agree for argument's sake.  It's still
not necessary for uucp (i.e., /bin/uucp, and /usr/lib/uucp/uucico when
triggered by uucp rather than cron) to get the timezone from the kernel.
I've surrounded both of these programs with small scripts on several
systems, so I could modify their environments.  It's easy enough to
rename them and create a script with the original name that sets the 
TZ environment variable, then execs the real program.  I've also done
this so I could keep extra records saying who was calling them when.  
This is especially useful for the mail command; you might consider 
a mail script that calls one or more mailers, and if they all fail,
sends the mail to a nearby machine for routing.  The extra layer is
not a big enough overhead that anyone ever notices.

-- 
#echo 'Opinions Copyright 1989 by John Chambers; for licensing information contact:'
echo '	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)'
echo ''
saying