clock format for precision (time)

[Jim Kosloskey]

I have read and re-read the clock command help.

I do not see a format that will give me the time precision that we have come to know and love – to wit: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS[+|-]ZZZZ (for example)

The portion I do not see covered with clock command is the [+|-]ZZZZ.

Am I missing something or is the clock command unable to produce this precision?

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

Topic

[David Barr]

It looks like with TCL 8.5, you can use “%z”, but until then, you might have to use tricks like this:

Code:

set sec_local [clock seconds]
set sec_gmt [clock scan [clock format $sec_local -format {%Y%m%dT%H%M%S}] -gmt 1]
set offset [expr {abs($sec_gmt-$sec_local)/60}]
set sign [lindex { + – } [expr $sec_gmt < $sec_local]]
set zone "$sign[format "%02d%02d" [expr $offset/60] [expr $offset%60]]"
echo $zone

[Robert Milfajt]

I do not see it either.

You may want to try finding some web service out there that converts the time zone abbreviation to time zone offset.  I googled time zone web service and got a lot of responses.  I browsed a few and did not find what you were looking for.

I am sure there is some creative way using the -gmt flag to get the time in GMT and time in this location’s time zone and writing some conversion to find the offset.

Hope this helps,

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Jim Kosloskey]

Okay that is what I thought – clock does not have an intrinsic format that covers the offset.

So additional code will be needed to calculate the offset then append that to the returned value from a clock format command.

I just wanted to make sure I was not missing something here.

One point, when I constructed the code to calculate the offset it comes out a little different than what I would find using either the Xlate or convert_date to provide the offset.

For example we are Central time and normally what we see in the Xlate or as a result of convert_date is ….-0600 but when I do the code I get something like …-05nn (I don’t recall the exact value I received but it was not 0600).

So I am visiting that code some more to see if I can figure out why the discrepancy.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Robert Milfajt]

This might make a useful TCL extension, perhaps an hciclock command?

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Jim Kosloskey]

Actually convert_date (a Cloverleaf(R) provided command) does provide the familiar offset time stamp.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Mary Leuchtmann]

The offset would be -0600 for Central Standard Time, but -0500 for Central Daylight Time.

[Author]

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