Shell Programming and Scripting

I need some help trying to figure this out. I have written a bash script that uses gnu find command every minute to check any incoming/outgoing files and then take appropriate action. Everything works fine if we are in the US time zone but as soon as China and Europe time-zone come in my script won't do the trick. Users can't wait that long to get their files processed. How can I make my script scan for every new file regardless of time-zone?

You haven't posted your find script, therefore I have no idea why it isn't working.

Try checking the ctime instead of the mtime if they're uploading bad timestamps.

Sorry I haven't scripted this yet but I left out a few details. Files are being ftp/copied/nfs from different zones and they retain their time-stamps. So for example if my script run every minute which is in US then it will definitely not see the new file coming in from China, which I think they are 13 hours ahead. How do I solve that time-stamp issue?

Have you tried checking ctime(change time) instead of mtime(modification time)?

ctime should be the last time the file's inode was changed -- for a brand-new file, that'd be when the file was created. The ctime probably has a timestamp assigned by your system, not theirs.

One big question.
Is the server clock set to UTC ?

What should happen with an International server is that all file and database timestamps are held in UTC. Also unix cron is run in UTC with individual crontab lines prepended with the correct TZ environment variable. Each user or reporting process then has their timezone set (with the TZ environment variable) such that they see file or database item timestamps in their local timezone.

It would really help to post what Operating System you are running on this server. On many, the description of TZ is in man 5 environ .