4.10.10 Specifying time zone rules

Normally, dates are interpreted using the rules of the current time zone, which in turn are specified by the TZ environment variable, or by a system default if TZ is not set. To specify a different set of default time zone rules that apply just to one date, start the date with a string of the form ‘TZ="rule"’. The two quote characters (‘"’) must be present in the date, and any quotes or backslashes within rule must be escaped by a backslash.

For example, with the GNU date command you can answer the question “What time is it in New York when a Paris clock shows 6:30am on October 31, 2019?” by using a date beginning with ‘TZ="Europe/Paris"’ as shown in the following shell transcript:

$ export TZ="America/New_York"
$ date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2019-10-31 06:30'
Sun Oct 31 01:30:00 EDT 2019

In this example, the --date operand begins with its own TZ setting, so the rest of that operand is processed according to ‘Europe/Paris’ rules, treating the string ‘2019-10-31 06:30’ as if it were in Paris. However, since the output of the date command is processed according to the overall time zone rules, it uses New York time. (Paris was normally six hours ahead of New York in 2019, but this example refers to a brief Halloween period when the gap was five hours.)

A TZ value is a rule that typically names a location in the ‘tz’ database. A recent catalog of location names appears in the TWiki Date and Time Gateway. A few non-GNU hosts require a colon before a location name in a TZ setting, e.g., ‘TZ=":America/New_York"’.

The ‘tz’ database includes a wide variety of locations ranging from ‘Africa/Abidjan’ to ‘Pacific/Tongatapu’, but if you are at sea and have your own private time zone, or if you are using a non-GNU host that does not support the ‘tz’ database, you may need to use a POSIX rule instead. The previously-mentioned POSIX rule ‘UTC0’ says that the time zone abbreviation is ‘UTC’, the zone is zero hours away from Greenwich, and there is no daylight saving time. POSIX rules can also specify nonzero Greenwich offsets. For example, the following shell transcript answers the question “What time is it five and a half hours east of Greenwich when a clock seven hours west of Greenwich shows 9:50pm on July 12, 2022?”

$ TZ="<+0530>-5:30" date --date='TZ="<-07>+7" 2022-07-12 21:50'
Wed Jul 13 10:20:00 +0530 2022

This example uses the somewhat-confusing POSIX convention for rules. ‘TZ="<-07>+7"’ says that the time zone abbreviation is ‘-07’ and the time zone is 7 hours west of Greenwich, and ‘TZ="<+0530>-5:30"’ says that the time zone abbreviation is ‘+0530’ and the time zone is 5 hours 30 minutes east of Greenwich. Although trickier POSIX TZ settings like ‘TZ="<-05>+5<-04>,M3.2.0/2,M11.1.0/2"’ can specify some daylight saving regimes, location-based settings like ‘TZ="America/New_York"’ are typically simpler and more accurate historically. See Specifying the Time Zone with TZ in The GNU C Library.