UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all, this is my first post so I hope someone can help me. I am currently putting code into a script that is run through the cron on a unix box where the date/time is set to EDT or Eastern Daylight Time but I am in Central Standard time. The program I am adding code to runs every hour and I put some code in it to create a file with a date stamp on the end of it. Well the program is supposed to create a new file every day and when the day rolls over at (supposedly) midnight but midnight is not really midnight so I need a way to run a date command and pulls back the date in CST rather than EDT and I can't change the TZ environmental variable. I need to try to do this in the date command but I'm kinda stumped anybody help me with some syntax to retrieve the date in CST time and not do any calculations on the date variable with anything because I don't want to have to worry about maintaining this program if the crazy sys admin decides to change the system date back to CST??????????

There is no sensible reason to prohibit you from fiddling with the TZ variable. You inherit a copy of your parent's TZ variable, but if you change yours, no one else's will change. You can also spawn a child with a different value than yours if you want like this:
TZ=CST4CDT date
This works with bourne and korn shells, the c-shell doesn't allow it. But even there you can save the old value, change it, run date, and change it back.