Cron job in a different timezone

Question

Is there a way of setting up a cronjob for a specific timezone?

My shared hosting is in USA (Virginia) and I am in UK. If I set a cron job to be executed at 1600 hrs every friday, then it will execute when its 1600 in Virginia.

I was wondering if I can setup my cronjob in such a way that it understands which timezone to pick. I am not too worried about daylight saving difference.

I have asked my shared hosting providers about it and they said I should be able to set the timezone in some cron ini files, but I could not find any.

Tribunate

probably better for unix.stackexchange.com or superuser.stackexchange.com – Calipash

Answer 1

I think that you should check

/etc/default/cron

or just type

Crontab cronfile

and you should find

TZ=UTC

This should be changed (for example America/New_York). Second way is set in cron example

5 2 3 * * TZ="America/New_York" /do/command > /dev/null 2>&1

Hahnert

Thanks Bartosz. 1. There is no default folder in etc folder. And there is no cron folder either 2. When I set TZ="America/New_york" or "Europe/London" I get curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'TZ=America' error. – Tribunate

Note that the TZ specifications in the crontab doesn't affect when the job is executed. It just specifies which timezone should be used by the process once launched by cron. – Esperanzaespial

Answer 2

You can use the CRON_TZ environment variable, excerpt from man 5 crontab on a CentOS 6 server:

The CRON_TZ specifies the time zone specific for the cron table. User type into the chosen table times in the time of the specified time zone. The time into log is taken from local time zone, where is the daemon running.

So if you add this at the top of your cron entry:

CRON_TZ=Europe/London

You should be good.

Summersault

You should always use man 5 crontab and search for TZ first since usage of CRON_TZ varies a lot across different distros. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS does not support CRON_TZ neither. – Romansh

Execute crontab -e and add CRON_TZ=Europe/London at the top of the file. – Occidentalize

Answer 3

If you want to set different timezone for your particular cronjob, execute crontab -evia ssh and add

TZ=Europe/Moscow

before every cronjob.

Full article here

Cholecystectomy

link is dead, some example would be nice ;-) – Doretha

Archive.org snapshot of the dead link: web.archive.org/web/20160520231318/http://blog.tural.us/… – Lundberg

Answer 4

To expand on AlexT's answer:

CRON_TZ="Europe/London"

is the answer.

p.s. If anyone is here looking for timezone fixes for GoDaddy, I recommend putting...

export TZ="Europe/London"

...in your .bashrc so that your console runs in your timezone.

Zyrian

Answer 5

On Ubuntu 18.08

host@machine$crontab -e

then enter

TZ=Asia/Kolkata 

Note:- Replace Asia/Kolkata with your desire timezone

Leclair

Answer 6

I was not able to get it to work using CRON_TZ on Ubuntu 22.04. In the end I changed system timezone and restart cron.

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Kolkata
sudo systemctl restart cron

I spent a lot of time debugging before I figured out that I should restart cron after changing the timezone.

Vampire