Very Computer

I am developing some voice mail scripts for use under Linux.
One program schedules the delivery of voice messages.
To make this work properly across timezones I need to convert
a future (scheduled) time expressed in another zone into local time.

The only way I can see of doing this easily is to do something like:

        LOCAL_SAVE=`date`
        TZ=<remote zone> date -s <REMOTE_TIME>
        LOCAL_TIME=`TZ=localtime date +FORMAT`
        date -s <LOCAL_SAVE>

But this changes the system's time for an instant -- not at all nice.

My current method uses a fixed timzone offset calculated at the
current time.  This of course will make scheduling inaccurate around
time discontinuities.

Is there any way to do what I want without having to hack some C code;
and if I have to write some C, what is the best way to go about it.

Thanks for your help,

Basser Department of Computer Science, F09   |  PHONE : +61-2-692-4276   |
The University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA  |  FAX   : +61-2-692-3838   |

Probably not.

Quote:> and if I have to write some C, what is the best way to go about it.

The most portable way is to use putenv("TZ=..."), tzset, mktime, and
localtime in the proper order.  This is ugly, since it relies on global
state in your C program, but doing it right will mean you'll have to do
a lot of hacking yourself.