Solaris

To find out, make a one-off cron containing say:

Code:

env > /tmp/env.lst

It is surprising how sparse the cron environment is.

The supported and documented way is to set the TZ variable before the crontab command line. eg:

Code:

...
TZ=US/Eastern
10 * * * 1-5 /your/command here

This also affects how the date and hour specifications are to be interpreted.

That would affect everything in the crontab, though, not just the one.

Can you specify any environment there, or only TZ?

That would affect subsequent lines until TZ is set to another value.

TZ, SHELL and HOME are the environment variables that can be set this way.

However, I just noticed I overlook this is about Solaris 8 with which I'm afraid this syntax wasn't yet supported ...

Edit: I confirm this syntax is only supported by SunOS 5.11 based OSes (OpenSolaris, Solaris 11). Sorry for the confusion.

In a system where the users are in multiple timezones we would set the system clock to UTC and source a local environment script at the top of every user script (whether or not it was strictly necessary). The local environment script sets TZ, any local character sets, and a Country Code Environment Variable for the benefit of database programs which have variable currency or geography.

Long and complex crons are a maintenance nightmare. Avoid.

Imho Organise a crontab by function and write a script to display them in time order.

At least on Solaris, the system clock is always set to UTC. Having a default timezone set to UTC too, which is I guess what you really mean, might confuse (unaware) people editing crontabs as they probably expect its timezone to be set to the server location local time.
Cloud computing and migrating virtualized OSes, on the other hand, might defeat the very notion of server location ...

Yes, I checked using env as well:

SHELL=/bin/ksh


Thanks, I've solved it using a script from the cron line, I also understand it's a bit messy trying to script from the cron line.