Bug in GNU date

[Niall O Broin]

There is a bug in GNU date which manifests itself when TZ has no value in
the environment. See transcript below:

address@hidden:~ >echo $TZ

address@hidden:~ >for day in mon tues wednes thurs fri satur sun
do date -d "last ${day}day"
done
Mon Apr  1 00:00:00 IST 2002
Tue Apr  2 00:00:00 IST 2002
Wed Apr  3 00:00:00 IST 2002
Wed Mar 27 23:00:00 GMT 2002
Thu Mar 28 23:00:00 GMT 2002
Fri Mar 29 23:00:00 GMT 2002
Sat Mar 30 23:00:00 GMT 2002

address@hidden:~ >export TZ=GMT
address@hidden:~ >date
Thu Apr  4 14:14:30 GMT 2002
address@hidden:~ >for day in mon tues wednes thurs fri satur sun
do date -d "last ${day}day"
done
Mon Apr  1 00:00:00 GMT 2002
Tue Apr  2 00:00:00 GMT 2002
Wed Apr  3 00:00:00 GMT 2002
Thu Mar 28 00:00:00 GMT 2002
Fri Mar 29 00:00:00 GMT 2002
Sat Mar 30 00:00:00 GMT 2002
Sun Mar 31 00:00:00 GMT 2002

address@hidden:~ >export TZ=IST
address@hidden:~ >for day in mon tues wednes thurs fri satur sun
do date -d "last ${day}day"
done
Mon Apr  1 00:00:00 IST 2002
Tue Apr  2 00:00:00 IST 2002
Wed Apr  3 00:00:00 IST 2002
Thu Mar 28 00:00:00 IST 2002
Fri Mar 29 00:00:00 IST 2002
Sat Mar 30 00:00:00 IST 2002
Sun Mar 31 00:00:00 IST 2002

address@hidden:~ >export TZ=
address@hidden:~ >for day in mon tues wednes thurs fri satur sun; do date -d
"last ${day}day"; done
Mon Apr  1 00:00:00 UTC 2002
Tue Apr  2 00:00:00 UTC 2002
Wed Apr  3 00:00:00 UTC 2002
Thu Mar 28 00:00:00 UTC 2002
Fri Mar 29 00:00:00 UTC 2002
Sat Mar 30 00:00:00 UTC 2002
Sun Mar 31 00:00:00 UTC 2002


I have verified this with several distributions of Gnu/Linux, all of which
used sh-utils 2.0. I got and compiled 2.0.11 from alpha.gnu.org and the bug
persists in this version.


Kindest regards,


Niall  O Broin