I know date can be formatted to UTC by using %aT. Is there anyway to format a date to include the time zone offset (eg 2012-11-15T14:22:00-05:00)?
If the OS does not support `%z' then you might be able to use the internal time formatter by prepending a `|' (pipe) to the time format (i.e. before the `%Y'): the internal formatter (currently undocumented) usually supports `%z'.