Re: Error on specific date

[Paul Eggert]

Philip Rowlands <address@hidden> writes:

> I can't reproduce this. Here's what I get with the
> "tzdata-2006p-1.fc5" installed on Fedora Core 5:
>
> $ export TZ=Brazil/East
> $ date --date="2006-10-15"
> Sun Oct 15 00:00:00 BRT 2006

I can reproduce the problem on Debian stable (with coreutils 6.7 date)
as follows:

TZ=America/Sao_Paulo date --date="2005-10-16"

(I chose the different time to avoid problems if you have obsolete tz
data; Brazil changed again recently.)

The problem is that the stated date is equivalent to 2005-10-16
00:00:00, which is an invalid time stamp for that location, because
the clock jumped ahead at that point (the previous tick was 2005-10-15
23:59:59 and the next tick 2005-10-16 01:00:00).  Older versions of
GNU 'date' did not diagnose invalid time stamps, but that led to other
problems.  Newer versions of GNU 'date' therefore diagnose invalid
time stamps.

To work around the problem, you can use something like this:

TZ=America/Sao_Paulo date --date="2005-10-16 12:00:00"