Part of the [clock] command. See http://purl.org/tcl/home/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/clock.htm for the formal man page.

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[JMN] 2007-11-14

On FreeBSD - you can configure the timezone to UTC by removing /etc/localtime.  I don't know if this is actually a legitimate way to set it to UTC, but it was the only way I knew of until now, and it does seem to cause a problem with Tcl's clock scan.

 % clock scan "2007-11-01" -format "%Y-%m-%d"
 time value too large/small to represent
 % clock scan "2007-11-01" -format "%Y-%m-%d"
 1193875200

The call fails the first time only, and then works fine.

If you configure the timezone to UTC by instead making /etc/localtime a link to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC  the problem doesn't occur. 
I have a number of systems configured with no /etc/localtime - but I guess I'll change that now in light of this.

This issue also shows up in the FAQ on amsn-project.net 

Is a missing /etc/localtime something that clock scan should be able to handle - or is it would it be considered an OS configuration issue?

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