[R-SIG-Mac] Timezone not working?

[Simon Urbanek]

Tim,

On Dec 20, 2005, at 2:55 PM, Timothy Bates wrote:

> Hi there,
> This is pretty trivial:
>
> Sys.time()        -->  "2005-11-09 03:18:32 GMT"
> Sys.timezone() -->  ""

      'Sys.timezone' returns an OS-specific character string, possibly
      an empty string.

and it's as simple as
as.vector(Sys.getenv("TZ"))

However, TZ is only used to *override the default timezone* (as per  
POSIX) so by default you get an empty string.
caladan:urbanek$ date
Wed Dec 28 09:40:15 EST 2005
caladan:urbanek$ TZ=GMT date
Wed Dec 28 14:40:15 GMT 2005

> i.e., Sys.time works, and knows where I am (I think – perhaps GMT  
> is an accident of living on the prime meridian),

... and the only place on Earth where Windows and unix actually agree  
on the time ;).

Cheers,
Simon