Let us say you need to display time for different zones or cities. Sure you can use The World Clock – Time Zones located here. If you need a different time zone at a shell prompt or script use old good date command.
Different timezones can be displayed by changing the TZ environment variable.
TZ Specifies the timezone, unless overridden by command line parameters. If neither is specified, the setting from /etc/localtime is used by Linux/UNIX computer.
Display current date and timezone
$ date
Output:
Tue Jul 24 22:05:54 CDT 2007
Display time of different timezones using the date command and TZ variable
Set timezone to PDT:
$ export TZ=America/Los_Angeles
$ date
Output:
Tue Jul 24 20:12:01 PDT 2007
Or set timezone to IST:
$ export TZ=Asia/Calcutta
$ date
Output:
Wed Jul 25 08:46:12 IST 2007
Remove the TZ variable with unset command:
$ unset TZ
$ date
Output:
Tue Jul 24 22:17:31 CDT 2007
Read date,bash,unset command man page for more information. Hope this small tip will save your time and see a different time zone.
Related: Howto: Redhat enterprise Linux / CentOS setup DST – Daylight Saving Time
4 comment
why would you need to export it? Bash is a line by line shell interpreter, so you can just put the TZ variable before the program date. Like this: TZ=America/New_York date. This is a better solution if you just need to check the time difference real quick.
If you are living in a different time zone in awhile just change your timezone in /etc/rc.conf or whichever file your *NIX distribution configures this sort of thing.
The only time i had to export this variable is on my account on a shell server. It is based in Germany and I live in usa so I just had to put
export TZ=America/Chicagoin my .bashrc.Thanks, and have a good one
use this
$ TZ=IST date
no need to export or reset the TZ variable
You need to export it because date is not a bash command, it is a separate process that is being forked. Exporting a variable means making it available for forked processes (child processes).
If it works in your shell without exporting it, it means that your shell provides the date functionality directly without calling /bin/date.
@Frank: No, the Bourne family of shells specifically allow you to set an environment variable for a child process using the syntax VAR=value cmd — the value of VAR will be available to cmd, and persist while it executes, but no longer.