Mike Griffin

I host this site on a server that is based in the USA and therefore the timezone on the server doesn’t correspond with local time here in Ireland. I tried all sorts of workarounds to get the correct time or to work out the offset and then mentally figure out what happened when. Then I had some inspiration. Surely I wasn’t the first person to run into this inconvenience. A quick look at the bash homepage later and I found the solution.

The simple way to fix timezone issues when you aren’t in the same timezone as the server that you are accessing is to set the TZ environment variable. Here’s how to do that in bash. Just add this line to your .bashrc

export TZ="/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Dublin"

There are loads of different timezone files located in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Find the one you want and hey presto!