world time on console

noir911 · 11-07-2006, 03:58 AM

I'm trying to get different countries time on my console of Fedora 5. I do "env TZ=russia date" or "env TZ=singapore date" and it gives me the same time in both the cases; eg. "Mon Nov 6 09:47:37 russia 2006". My localtime is correct and I'm not sync'ing with any NTPD. Looks like whatever world-time I choose is always +10 GMT/UTC. My local time is in AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time).

blackhole54 · 11-07-2006, 04:22 AM

I have not unravelled all of the mysteries of how linux deals with time zones, but I believe the date command is taking its time zone info from /etc/localtime independent of the value of TZ. You can find the time in a different zone using the zdump command with the time zone file as its argument. For example, to find out what time it is in Denver, type:

zdump /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver

If you are going to do this a lot, this is something that would easily lend itself to simple scripting to save yourself some typing.

(I am on a public winXP computer and am doing this from memory, so I may have made an error in the path in my example. If so, adjust accordingly.)

matthewg42 · 11-07-2006, 06:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackhole54

I have not unravelled all of the mysteries of how linux deals with time zones, but I believe the date command is taking its time zone info from /etc/localtime independent of the value of TZ. You can find the time in a different zone using the zdump command with the time zone file as its argument. For example, to find out what time it is in Denver, type:

zdump /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver

blackhole54 - I didn't know about the zdump command - thanks a lot, I had wondered if there was a mechanism to do this. It turns out you can omit the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ if you like.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackhole54

If you are going to do this a lot, this is something that would easily lend itself to simple scripting to save yourself some typing.

(I am on a public winXP computer and am doing this from memory, so I may have made an error in the path in my example. If so, adjust accordingly.)

Your memory is fine.

noir911, you could define an alias and put it in your .bashrc. I assume there is a some standard list of locations for which you wish to show the time. For example:

Code:

$ alias show_my_times='zdump Singapore Europe/Moscow Europe/London US/Eastern'
$ show_my_times
Singapore      Tue Nov  7 20:42:49 2006 SGT
Europe/Moscow  Tue Nov  7 15:42:49 2006 MSK
Europe/London  Tue Nov  7 12:42:49 2006 GMT
US/Eastern     Tue Nov  7 07:42:49 2006 EST

To find the names of the timezones, you can do something like this:

Code:

$ find /usr/share/zoneinfo -type f |grep -i singapore |xargs zdump |cut -c21-
Asia/Singapore        Tue Nov  7 20:45:05 2006 SGT
posix/Asia/Singapore  Tue Nov  7 20:45:05 2006 SGT
posix/Singapore       Tue Nov  7 20:45:05 2006 SGT
right/Asia/Singapore  Tue Nov  7 20:44:42 2006 SGT
right/Singapore       Tue Nov  7 20:44:42 2006 SGT
Singapore             Tue Nov  7 20:45:05 2006 SGT

As you can see there are many different definitions for Singapore. Just choose the one you want.

blackhole54 · 11-07-2006, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by matthewg42

blackhole54 - I didn't know about the zdump command - thanks a lot, I had wondered if there was a mechanism to do this. It turns out you can omit the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ if you like.

Then we both learned something.

I wasn't aware you could drop the first part of the path or that you could give multiple arguments. I had also forgotten that zdump is in /usr/sbin which means it probably won't be in the PATH of a normal user. However, no priviledge is required to actually run it.