On 02/12/2020 10:30, Martin McCormick wrote: > In a recent discussion, someone indicated that there might be a > way to set individual parts such as accounts on a unix system so > that cron could use another time zone if needed to kickoff jobs > on that system based on the time in another country. > > As far as I understand cron, one can set the system's > time zone to only one value which is usually one's local clock > time and that works very well since system logs and cron jobs all > agree with what is appropriate for one's location. > > I record a news broadcast from one of the BBC services > every week day at 17:45 British time. When Europe and North > America stop or start shifting daylight in Autumn or Spring, > there's a really good chance of missing some of the broadcasts if > one doesn't think about it since these shifts don't all happen on > the same time. > > One can certainly get the time anywhere as recently > discussed by setting the TZ environment variable but, if you tell > cron to trigger a job at 17:45, it only knows when that is based > on the entire system's local time. > > Has anything changed recently to make this logic > obsolete? > > In my case, I just have an old Linux box for which I set > it's system time zone to Europe/London and call it good but this > could get out of hand if one had more than 2 or 3 such schedules. > > One could also setup VM's if you have the memory to spare > but this adds a lot of resource usage and complexity to the job > at hand so my question is basically, has anything fundamentally > changed in the way cron is used? > > This is not a complaint at all. I was first introduced to > unix-like systems in 1989 and immediately knew that this was the > sort of OS I wanted to stick with in amateur radio and technical > tinkering in general. > > Martin McCormick WB5AGZ > systemd timers seem to allow specification of activation time including a time zone. However, I'm not sure if DST changes are considered - it might just convert the specified time to the local time zone when the timer definition is read so that you can specify '17:45 GMT' and it runs at, say, your 10:45, but it won't automatically pick up that 17:45 GMT is not 11:45 local. I might be wrong, though.
-- To do nothing is to be nothing. Eduardo M KALINOWSKI edua...@kalinowski.com.br
