You suggest in the on-line documentation for your Command-Line Utilities that the hardware RTC should be set to UTC, which I've done. Some of my OS/2 programs are now talking to me in UTC rather than local time. I have the TZ environment variable set in my CONFIG.SYS file, but that doesn't seem to help. These programs don't respect it. How can I convince them to display local time?
This is the Frequently Given Answer to that question.
There are three approaches to this. The third one is the best, since it fixes the problem in the right way; but for obvious reasons it's also the most difficult to effect.
Your applications are broken. Stop using them and replace them with better ones.
You may think this harsh, but it is no more than the simple truth. Applications that don't understand the TZ environment variable are broken, with respect to timekeeping. Applications that expect the hardware RTC to run in local time are also broken (because this yields unresolvable ambiguities, and a "UTC" time that is neither unidirectional nor monotonic).
In an ideal world, everyone would be using better applications that are not broken with respect to timekeeping; applications that handle timezones properly, in the way that 32-bit OS/2 was obviously originally designed for them to be handled. Depending from the application, there may or may not be such replacements available.
DIGCLOCK.
SAYDATE, and
the DATE and TIME commands that accompany the
32-bit Command Interpreter,
all understand the TZ environment variable and will display either the
correct local time (applying DST adjustments automatically) or UTC.
XDIR, and
the DIR command that accompanies the