[time-nuts] viewing the upcoming leapsecond with XDaliClock

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Thu Jul 10 03:10:00 EDT 2008


>  I'm new to the list and would like to ask about displaying the
> upcoming leap second on a linux workstation. 

Stick around.  There will be a big party.

You might check the archives to see the discussion from the last one.


>  I've done quite a bit of scroogling in an attempt to determine how
> the time is kept in the kernel and how it makes it's way through
> to userspace for applications like date and xdaliclock to access.

The kernel works in UTC.

Conversion to/from local time is done in userspace, usually in the c library.

Daylight time is a nightmare because politicians keep changing the rules.  
There is a project that tries to keep track of things.  Essentially, all of 
the open source projects use it.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoneinfo

The default conversion info is stored in /etc/localtime

There is an environment variable, TZ (I think) so you can use your preference 
rather than the default.  This might be handy if you dial in to a system in 
another zone.




-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.






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