Cron Jobs and Time Zones Has Anything Changed?
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
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