[TUHS] Off topic: BSD timezone function vs. POSIX timezone variable

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/14/23 10:14 AM, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
> Aharon Robbins <arnold at skeeve.com> writes:
> 
>> Hi All.
>>
>> This is a bit off-topic, but people here are likely to know the answer.
>>
>> V7 had a timzone function:
>>
>> 	char *timezone(int zone, int dst);
>>
>> that returned a timezone name.  POSIX has a timezone variable which is
>> the offset in seconds from UTC.
>>
>> The man pages for all of {Net,Free,Open}BSD seem to indicate that both
>> are available on those systems.
>>
>> My question is, how? The declarations for both are given as being in <time.h>.
>> But don't the symbols in libc.a conflict with each other? How does a programmer
>> on *BSD choose which version of timezone they will get?
> 
> OpenBSD 7.3 only has "extern long timezone" and no timezone(3) function.
> 
> FreeBSD 14.0 only has the timezone(3) function (under _BSD_VISIBLE),
> and doesn't set any variables.

Darwin (macOS) conditionally defines them. If you want POSIX 2003
compatibility, define __DARWIN_UNIX03 and get

extern long timezone __DARWIN_ALIAS(timezone);

If you don't define that, you get

char *timezone(int, int);

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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