What time zone is a cron job using?

Cron job uses the server's define timezone (UTC by default) which you can check by typing the date command in terminal.

All countries timezones are defined in /usr/share/zoneinfo directory:

cd  /usr/share/zoneinfo/

When you cd into this directory you will see the name of different countries and their timezone.

Command to change server timezone.

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime

If you live in America > LA you can change your time-zone using above command. Change the country and state according to your requirement.

Command to check the date and time:

 date

Set time and date from the command line:

date -s "19 APR 2012 11:14:00"

If you have may users, with many crontabs and they have different time zone requirements, you cannot just change system timezone.

But you still can set a specific time zone to be used just for the cron jobs in a specific crontab setting the variable CRON_TZ at the beginning of the crontab.

E.g.

#@IgnoreInspection BashAddShebang
SHELL=/usr/bin/bash
CRON_TZ=UTC
PROJECT_DIR=/home/MY_USER/MY_PROJECT

40 06 * * 1-5 $PROJECT_DIR/prod/ingest.sh >> $PROJECT_DIR/logs/ingest_cron.out 2>> $PROJECT_DIR/logs/ingest_cron.err