Bash alias trick: show multiple timezones

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Just a dumb trick I whipped up and was inordinately proud of. Sure I could go along to timeanddate dot com but I spend a lot of my time in my terminal and this is immediate. Small effort big payback.

OK, so the code is just this, added to .bashrc

tztime() {
  for tz_name in "$@"; do
    printf "    In %-15s its %s\n" "$tz_name" "$(TZ=$tz_name date +'%H:%M:%S %Z')"
  done
}
alias teamtime='tztime America/Chicago UTC Europe/London Asia/Manila Asia/Tokyo'

The first block is the function that does all the work, formatting the dates nicely.

  • for tz_name in "$@"; do loops over all arguments supplied as space-separated array.
  • TZ=$tz_name date +'%H:%M:%S %Z sets the TZ environment variable and then runs date with the specified format. (TZ in your shell remains unchanged)
  • %-15s prints the time-zone name left-aligned in a field at least 15 characters wide. This was just to get them to align nicely

The alias is whatever you want to call it, and is basically a space separated list of timezones you want to look at. Edit away. Output:

teamtime
    In America/Chicago its 22:03:13 CDT
    In UTC             its 03:03:13 UTC
    In Europe/London   its 03:03:13 GMT
    In Asia/Manila     its 11:03:13 PST
    In Asia/Tokyo      its 12:03:13 JST

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