Can I change my time zone to New Zealand time?

The time displayed in your shell is controlled by a system variable called TZ. To change to New Zealand time you need to set the variable as follows:

export TZ="NZ"

This setting will automatically adjust for daylight saving, since the tzdata package is installed at the system level. Our system engineers will keep the tzdata package up to date.

Making the change persistent

You can make your time zone setting persistent by adding the above line to your ~/.bashrc. If you do this, we recommend adding the following line to your ~/.bash_profile, or to your ~/.profile if you have the latter but not the former:

test -r ~/.bashrc && . ~/.bashrc

Please see the article, ".bashrc or .bash_profile?" for more information.

What about cron jobs?

To have the specifications in your crontab file interpreted as NZ times start it with:

CRON_TZ=NZ

Also note that cron does not source either ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile, so most environment variables will not be set, including TZ.