Retrieve countries timezones

Question

What is the best way to retrieve the current time zones of a number of countries, on a daily basis? (that would take into account DST changes, of course)

• Reliably
• If possible the Linux way (i.e. either using internal resources, or a Linux website API)

(I'm on Ubuntu 10.04)

Answer 1

If you just want the timezone, then timezones are stored in /usr/share/zoneinfo.

If you want to be able to retrieve the current time for a number of different cities or countries, then you can pull them from the Date and Time Gateway.

Answer 2

You can simply do something like this:

$ TZ=Europe/Moscow date
Thu Jun  9 08:34:46 MSD 2011
$ TZ=America/NewYork date
Thu Jun  9 04:34:48 America 2011

You can find the zone names in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Of course, this requires that the machine you run this on has the correct time set.

(You can't really get the time by country, because a lot of countries have more than one timezone.)