Daylight Savings and UNIX?

Anonymous asks: "My company recently asked me to write them a report on how UNIX properly handles the switch to Daylight Savings Time, and back again. When our systems administrators received the report, I was somewhat surprised. Many of them weren't aware that 'cron' would run the affected jobs twice in the fall, and not at all in the spring. Apparently, the man pages on some operating systems, like Solaris, aren't forthcoming with details. Others groups, like database administrators, are completely unaware of the differences between epoch time and wall clock time. Are even technical users ignorant on how UNIX handles time, time zones, and time conversion?"

Comments

In FreeBSD...

[cperciva]

In FreeBSD, the default times for daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs are chosen so that they don't fall within the daylight savings time mess.

Re:Wrong

[mvdwege]

I can corroborate the previous statements.

Although I am on Debian like the first two posters to reply, I did some more checking, and Debian installs vixie cron. AFAIK this is what most Linux distros install by default, including Red Hat, which I runned before this.

Would you mind telling us what distro you had to dig up to find this gem? They deserve to be rightly flamed (and by extension if you can't give a satisfactory answer, you deserve to be flamed).

Mart