What’s your favourite way to look up the time in a different timezone? For many of us it’s a google search. Did you know that you can look it up easily from the command line too? The Linux utility tzselect
makes it possible.
Without further ado, here’s how you can look up the time at Paris:
$ tzselect
Please identify a location so that time zone rules can be set correctly.
Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", or "TZ".
1) Africa
2) Americas
3) Antarctica
4) Asia
5) Atlantic Ocean
6) Australia
7) Europe
8) Indian Ocean
9) Pacific Ocean
10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates.
11) TZ - I want to specify the time zone using the Posix TZ format.
#? 7
Please select a country whose clocks agree with yours.
1) Åland Islands 18) Greece 35) Norway
2) Albania 19) Guernsey 36) Poland
3) Andorra 20) Hungary 37) Portugal
4) Austria 21) Ireland 38) Romania
5) Belarus 22) Isle of Man 39) Russia
6) Belgium 23) Italy 40) San Marino
7) Bosnia & Herzegovina 24) Jersey 41) Serbia
8) Britain (UK) 25) Latvia 42) Slovakia
9) Bulgaria 26) Liechtenstein 43) Slovenia
10) Croatia 27) Lithuania 44) Spain
11) Czech Republic 28) Luxembourg 45) Svalbard & Jan Mayen
12) Denmark 29) Macedonia 46) Sweden
13) Estonia 30) Malta 47) Switzerland
14) Finland 31) Moldova 48) Turkey
15) France 32) Monaco 49) Ukraine
16) Germany 33) Montenegro 50) Vatican City
17) Gibraltar 34) Netherlands
#? 15
The following information has been given:
France
Therefore TZ='Europe/Paris' will be used.
Local time is now: Fri Jun 17 18:50:39 CEST 2016.
Universal Time is now: Fri Jun 17 16:50:39 UTC 2016.
Is the above information OK?
1) Yes
2) No
#? ^C⏎
Now, a little more on tzselect
. It doesn’t take any parameters and you can quit any time using Ctrl-c
. As you an see above, the program is highly interactive and menu driven, making it very simple to use. Also, it doesn’t set the timezone of your system.
The timezone string from tzselect
can be used as a param to date
, though using the former is simpler as you don’t need to memorize anything.
$ TZ='Europe/Paris';date
Fri Jun 17 18:54:09 CEST 2016
However, if you just need to check the UTC time, date
is handy:
$ date -u
Fri Jun 17 16:55:11 UTC 2016
Very handy tool! Thanks.
You are welcome!