Gnu/coreutils/Time-zone-items
Next: Combined date and time of day items, Previous: Time of day items, Up: Date input formats [Contents][Index]
29.4 Time zone items
A time zone item specifies an international time zone, indicated
by a small set of letters, e.g., ‘UTC
’ or ‘Z
’
for Coordinated Universal
Time. Any included periods are ignored. By following a
non-daylight-saving time zone by the string ‘DST
’ in a separate
word (that is, separated by some white space), the corresponding
daylight saving time zone may be specified.
Alternatively, a non-daylight-saving time zone can be followed by a
time zone correction, to add the two values. This is normally done
only for ‘UTC
’; for example, ‘UTC+05:30
’ is equivalent to
‘+05:30
’.
Time zone items other than ‘UTC
’ and ‘Z
’
are obsolescent and are not recommended, because they
are ambiguous; for example, ‘EST
’ has a different meaning in
Australia than in the United States, and ‘A
’ has different
meaning as a military time zone than as an obsolescent
RFC 822 time zone. Instead, it’s better to use
unambiguous numeric time zone corrections like ‘-0500
’, as
described in the previous section.
If neither a time zone item nor a time zone correction is supplied, timestamps are interpreted using the rules of the default time zone (see Specifying time zone rules).