Timezone issue with cron

Question

My cron jobs are computed one hour later compared to server time. I don't understand what is going on.

My configuration is the following :

Server time :

Europe/Paris

In /etc/default/cron I added the following line :

TZ="Europe/Paris"

Despite that, cron job are launched one hour later than server time. What is really tricky, is that if I ask cron to play instruction "date", it gives the server date (the good one !).

I have no idea of how to resolve this problem ; I've been doing some reading on forums, but found nothing interesting.

What do you think ?

Answer 1

(Copying my comment as an answer, since it turned out to be the solution; I guessed right.)

So cron jobs are being scheduled in UTC (Europe/Paris is at a one hour offset from UTC).

The Vixie cron man page says:

The daemon will use, if present, the definition from /etc/timezone for the timezone.

What's in /etc/timezone? Have you modified /etc/timezone more recently than the cron process was started? Have you tried

/etc/init.d/cron restart

?

Answer 2

Wikipedia says

Most cron implementations simply interpret crontab entries in the system time zone setting under which the cron daemon itself is run. This can be a source of dispute if a large multiuser machine has users in several time zones, especially if the system default timezone includes the potentially confusing DST. Thus, a cron implementation may special-case any "TZ=" environment variable setting lines in user crontabs, interpreting subsequent crontab entries relative to that timezone

So perhaps your login ID has a TZ setting that differs from the system TZ setting?