#RUNNING UTC CLOCK HOW TO#

# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon), # To define the time you can provide concrete values for # indicating with different fields when the task will be run # Each task to run has to be defined through a single line So your crontab will look something like this: # Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron. To change that, put this in your crontab before any commands: TZ=UTC Your cron jobs will now run on a UTC-based schedule - HOWEVER, even though the time they are executed will be UTC, when they run they will have the timezone set to whatever is defined for the system. Now, restart the cron daemon: service cron restart

Make the new cron file executable: chmod ugo+rx cron I used vim, but you can use any editor you want, just make the file look like this: #!/bin/bash

There may be a more elegant way, but this way works.įirst, we need wrap the cron executable in a shell that sets the TZ variable.

#RUNNING UTC CLOCK HOW TO#

OK, I took some time and figured out how to do this on Ubuntu Natty, and here's how I made it work. You could script this as well.Īs an alternative approach, also have a look at the syntax of cron, which should execute scripts after booting, which sounds like what you might want. So if this is an ever running server, you could just set TZ to UTC, reboot, and after boot set it to your local timezone.

cron only reads the TZ info off the system at startup. There is a nasty way to hack it if you wanted. To do so, people often use perl or python or similar scripting languages). if you know you are only concerned about DST changes, kick it off 2 hours before, calculate the time difference, and kick it off then. Most solutions I have seen involve a utility in the middle, so cron would kick off something that would then determine when to kick of in UTC (e.g. etc/default/cron and other TZ specifications in the crontab just specify what TZ should be used for the processes started by cron, it doesn't impact the start time.

Running utc clock