cron timezone debian-etch utc – How to Set a Time Zone for a Crontab

crondebian-etchtimezoneutc

I would like to use UTC for the scheduling times in a crontab for a single user, regardless of the current time zone of the server. How do I do this on Debian Etch?

Best Answer

you can set the variable TZ in /etc/default/cron. but this is the timezone for all crontabs.

another alternative is using fcron. the documentation shows an option to set the timezone in each crontab.

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Linux – A cron replacement that handles multiple time zones

I think you're trying to have it both ways and the reality is that you just can't. If you want a job to run at 8 AM local time, for example, regardless of whether daylight saving is active then you either run your system (and cron) in local time and don't do seasonal edits or you run it in UTC (not GMT) and do seasonal edits. If you want your jobs to run at the same UTC, regardless, then you run cron according to UTC and there's nothing more to do.

If what you want is for a user to be able to schedule a cron job according to his local time zone and not have him have to think about conversions for his convenience then you write a conversion script that accepts a cron spec and a time zone then does the conversion to UTC behind the scenes and edits the crontab for him. It could even be a two-way conversion to handle changes to existing entries.

It will be helpful if you tell us what you're actually trying to accomplish.

Linux – How to edit the crontab of another user on the linux server

Try

crontab -e -u jake

You will need to be root for this to work.

Best Answer

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Linux – A cron replacement that handles multiple time zones

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