You can use the "env" command to simplify those aliases. For example, the line below would show you central time. alias cst="env TZ=US/Central date" It's just another example of how there are a million different ways to do the same thing in Unix and Linux. Another utility which could come in handy if you are not quite sure of what exactly the time zone is in a given area is tzselect. It gives you several menus to select continent, country, and if needed, location. It then gives you the proper value for the TZ environment variable for that location. It can be run by any user.
