UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

A few days ago I changed my CentOS box's timezone to -07:00.
Now the date commands output look like this (run almost simultaneously, less than 1 second delay)..

Code:

# date
Mon Sep  5 20:23:40 PDT 2011
# date -u
Tue Sep  6 03:24:05 UTC 2011

The hours difference seems correct, but why is the UTC time 25 seconds ahead?
I always thought that those two commands should only differ by the timezone (and daylight saving if applicable).

Thanks.

Just a suggestion. One shows hardware time (UTC, I think) and other linux kernel time setting with some network daemon. You can check you hardware time with hwclock (as root).

I changed the timezone again, and now the 'seconds' part is perfectly synchronized between "date" and "date -u".
hwclock seems to be 2 seconds ahead of "date".
Still not sure why the 'seconds' part differs by 25 seconds before... but thanks for the additional info regarding the difference between hardware and kernel times.

Cheers.