converting to world date/timezones on linux, with the humble date

Playing with dates in linux, our humble date is well equipped.

• Want the IST date, in case your host is a PDT/UTC one.

#TZ="Asia/Calcutta" date

• Want a specific date (older)

# TZ="Asia/Calcutta" date -d "2011-07-10 19:58 PDT"

Mon Jul 11 08:28:00 IST 2011

• Other way

# TZ="America/Los_Angeles" date -d "2011-07-10 7:58 IST"

Sat Jul 9 19:28:00 PDT 2011

• If you need to find all the valid country specific timezone constants :

# ls -l /usr/share/zoneinfo/{continent}/{city}

• Here is something cool you can do at your bash prompt:

PS1="[\$(TZ=\"Asia/Calcutta\" date +%D-%k:%M:%S) IST, \$(TZ=\"America/Los_Angeles\" date +%D-%k:%M:%S) PDT]"

PS1="$PS1\[\e[36m\]\u\[\e[0m\]"

PS1="$PS1@"

Shows me this

[07/12/11-17:32:24 IST, 07/12/11- 5:02:24 PDT]myname@myhost]$