Subj : Re TZUTC To : Paul Quinn From : Maurice Kinal Date : Mon Mar 04 2019 16:52:39 Hey Paul! PQ> Maurice mistakenly refuses to accept that Fidonet can and will PQ> set its own standards Wrong. Maurice refuses to program obvious corrupt standards which is why the TZUTC in this reply deploys the offset which honours the inclusion of the - character for timezones west of prime meridian rather than drop the + from utc (+0000) which the clock here is actually set to. That way it doesn't cause grief for any of the time based applications used on the system, such as sorting based on datetime stamps. Also it can be used to compensate for the lame FTN datetime stamp by adding the REAL datetime stamp lovingly called RFC-3339 (in nanoseconds) and can be used in a proper sort whereas your TZUTC will cause a failure as demonstrated below; -={ ':read !TZ=UTC date --rfc-3339=ns --date="05 Mar 19 09:13:00 1000"' starts }=- date: invalid date ‘05 Mar 19 09:13:00 1000’ -={ ':read !TZ=UTC date --date="05 Mar 19 09:13:00 1000"' ends }=- Now had you put in a proper (correct) utc offset string then this will happen; -={ ':read !TZ=UTC date --rfc-3339=ns --date="05 Mar 19 09:13:00 +1000"' starts }=- 2019-03-04 23:13:00.000000000+00:00 -={ ':read !TZ=UTC date --rfc-3339=ns --date="05 Mar 19 09:13:00 +1000"' ends }=- The above can be compared to other msg's to determine their proper place in an archive as opposed to the current, obviously lame FTN datetime stamp along with it's corrupted utc offset. BTW your FTN datetime stamp looks fudged. ;-) Life is good, Maurice .... A Møøse once bit my sister ... --- GNU bash, version 5.0.2(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) * Origin: Little Mikey's EuroPoint - Ladysmith BC, Canada (2:280/464.113) .