When will Tiger fall back on the time?

Question

I checked system preferences time and date and can't figure out when Tiger will fall my time on my computer back one hour - it hasn't done so yet. It is setup to get date & time from Apple server automatically.
Message was edited by: mjp29

Answer 1

You can check the dates when it changes by opening up the Terminal Application and copying and pasting (or type) these commands at the prompt:
<pre class="command">zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007</pre>
When you hit the "Enter" key, zdump will list all the time transitions for the current location, then send them to the grep program, which searches for "2007". This is what my computer says:
<pre class="command">/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 08:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 MST isdst=0
/etc/localtime Sun Mar 11 09:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 MDT isdst=1
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 MDT isdst=1
/etc/localtime Sun Nov 4 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 MST isdst=0</pre>
You can change the year in the end to look at different years. If there was no transition in a year, it just comes back to your prompt. If you want to see all the time zone transitions for your current location, just delete the | grep 2007 part of the command:
<pre class="command">zdump -v /etc/localtime</pre>
charlie