std-unix@ut-sally.UUCP (Moderator, John Quarterman) (01/10/86)
From: ukc!minster!forsyth Date: Thu, 9 Jan 86 18:03:15 GMT It can be helpful for TZ to be a per-process value (eg, in the environment). For instance, if I am logged in to a computer several time zones away, with TZ set to reflect my local time, I might say echo "echo go to the pub | write $NAME" | at 7pm to get a message at 7pm my time, or (in the same session) TZ= at 3am <ada-testrun to cause a long-running job to be started on the remote system at a little-used time (their time). Similarly, I might set TERM per process if I wish to check the output of a supposedly terminal-independent program for different terminal types: TERM=vt100 greeneking | vis TERM=520 greeneking | vis ... I might do something similar if running emulators in different layers, though arguably that might be handled by the ``per port'' notion. (Although /etc/ttytype or whatever is hard pressed to deal with people logging in on different terminals on the same network or dial-in port.) There are other ways of doing these things, but I find this compositional style more attractive than, say, -l (local time) or -z (time zone) options to `at' and other commands. I'd be interested to see other approaches. Volume-Number: Volume 5, Number 14