Question

Each of my users has a (possibly) different TZ defined in their .bashrc. I have a Perl script that displays date/time and want it to have it display with their profile time zone.

Does anyone know the best way to do this?

Answer 1

A simple answer is to use:

    use POSIX;
    .... 
    print strftime("%H:%M %Z", localtime);

But the zone returned by %Z varies from system to system. I have got GMT Daylight Time and BST on two different platforms.

Edit
The following is an experiment showing that (at least for me) %Z takes account of TZ

    export TZ=''
    perl -MPOSIX -e 'print strftime("%H:%M %Z\n", localtime)'
    export TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    perl -MPOSIX -e 'print strftime("%H:%M %Z\n", localtime)'

Produces output

    16:45 UTC
    09:45 PDT