How does the behavior of PHP's date functions differ between Windows and Linux systems?

PHP's date functions may behave differently on Windows and Linux systems due to differences in how each operating system handles date formatting and timezones. To ensure consistent behavior across platforms, it is recommended to explicitly set the timezone using the `date_default_timezone_set()` function in your PHP script.

// Set the timezone to UTC to ensure consistent behavior
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

// Now you can use date functions without worrying about platform-specific differences
echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s');