In article <4258e188$0$15601$e4fe514c@dreader16.news.xs4all.n l>, wouter wrote:

>Rene wrote:
>> I was checking a date library and tested it against date.
>> There is one thing I found
>> date --date "19370701"
>> returns
>> Wed Jun 30 23:59:32 NST 1937

>same here, tz as Europe/Amsterdam gives wrong date. other tz's give
>correct date (the one's i've checked that is)

I suspect this is something with the timezone file. If you grep for 1937
in the europe file (this happens to be from tzdata2005g file from March
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2005g.tar.gz), you'd find

# 0:19:32.13 AMT NST Amsterdam, Netherlands Summer (1835-1937)*
# 0:20 NET NEST Netherlands (1937-1940)*

and

# Howse's statement is only correct up to 1909. From 1909-05-01 (00:00:00
# Amsterdam mean time) onwards, the whole of the Netherlands (including
# the Dutch railways) was required by law to observe Amsterdam mean time
# (19 minutes 32.13 seconds ahead of GMT). This had already been the
# common practice (except for the railways) for many decades but it was
# not until 1909 when the Dutch government finally defined this by law.
# On 1937-07-01 this was changed to 20 minutes (exactly) ahead of GMT and
# was generally known as Dutch Time ("Nederlandse Tijd").

Apparently, the change took effect at 23:40:28 GMT 30 June 1937. I suspect
this might be where your strange time is coming from.

Old guy