Bash Snippet: CLI World Clock

Published on March 18, 2019 1 minute

When working in a global organization, colleagues are all around the world! And thus answering to “What time is it in their timezone?” becomes a frequent task. I initially used an online service for this but it is cumbersome and requires me to leave my terminal.

Let’s meet the CLI World clock!

function t() {
  for tz in Europe/Paris Europe/Dublin US/Eastern US/Central US/Pacific; do
    echo -e "$tz:\t$(TZ=$tz date -R)"
  done
}

You can copy/paste this snippet in your terminal or add it to your .bashrc to have it handy on every open terminal.

Each time I want to know which time it is for my colleagues, I run the t command:

$ t
Europe/Paris:    Mon, 18 Mar 2019 18:33:49 +0100
Europe/Dublin:   Mon, 18 Mar 2019 17:33:49 +0000
US/Eastern:      Mon, 18 Mar 2019 13:33:49 -0400
US/Central:      Mon, 18 Mar 2019 12:33:49 -0500
US/Pacific:      Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:33:49 -0700

The timezones used here comes from /usr/share/zoneinfo/.