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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

since i spend a lot of time in the console i have a few very simple aliases, for the following and some other time zones i use frequently.

    cst='TZ=CST6CDT date'
    est='TZ=EST date'
    berlin='TZ=''Europe/Berlin'' date'

then i can just convert times and needed.

    berlin -d '4:00pm EST'

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SO THAT'S HOW YOU SET ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES IN ALIASES! THANK YOU!

(I'd been making the slight-environment-change aliases into bash functions as a workaround. You just helped me so much.)

This works in a normal bash/zsh prompt as well if you want to set a variable only for that single command. It's why a lot of times you'll see build instructions like:

# CC=gcc make

After the command runs, CC will go back to whatever it was set to before (or unset if it wasn't set). Very handy for some operations.

I think that you can also use env(1) for this.

    berlin='env TZ=Europe/Berlin date'

Excellent idea. This, and I wonder when will I finally see a simple, practical web site that does just that: helps to schedule inter-timezone conf calls with minimal clicks. One such web site was once posted here on HN but it was unfinished at the time (didn't allow to add custom locations) and probably doesn't exist anymore.

I use http://everytimezone.com/ all the time.

Yes, nice, but incomplete (see my other reply in this thread)

I use:

http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/

http://everytimezone.com/

http://time.is/

Thanks, but:

http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/ - allows only two locations. What about scheduling a conf call across NY, Dublin, Berlin and Moscow? What is the best time for all 4 locations?

http://everytimezone.com/ - awesome interface, but doesn't allow any customizations, e.g. pick just the locations I need. This was on HN, I remember I made some suggestions which the guy never implemented.

http://time.is/ - shows only current time, or otherwise compares times only in two locations. Useless, just like thousands of other similar web sites.

Try this one by Armin Ronacher: http://timesched.pocoo.org/ - it's open source as well

Nice one, thanks!

I've used http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ for this in the past and it's worked really well.

Kind of like http://timesched.pocoo.org suggested in another comment here, but this one is more cluttered. Anyway, nice tool, thanks!

I have my chat client set to timestamp in UTC; helps a lot.

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