DATE command

[Robert]

From time to time, I run into a situation where I'd like to know the 
elapsed time between events.  In theory, this is easily accomplished by 
converting the date/time of both events to seconds since the epoch, then 
performing several divisions by the appropriate factors.

That is, until you run into this kind of weirdness in which "date" groks 
"CST", "EDT" and "EST" but throws up its hands at the thought of Central 
Daylight Time.

address@hidden ~]$ date -d "Dec 21 2004   7:42 AM CDT" +%s
date: invalid date `Dec 21 2004   7:42 AM CDT'
address@hidden ~]$ date -d "Dec 21 2004   7:42 AM CST" +%s
1103636520
address@hidden ~]$ date -d "Dec 21 2004   8:42 AM EDT" +%s
1103632920
address@hidden ~]$ date -d "Dec 21 2004   8:42 AM EST" +%s
1103636520
address@hidden ~]$

This is on a CentOS 5.4 machine, fully updated.

address@hidden ~]$ rpm -q coreutils
coreutils-5.97-23.el5_4.1.i386

My apologies if this has already been fixed upstream.