Cron Time Zones
How cron schedules interact with time zones and daylight saving time.
A cron expression describes a wall-clock time in one time zone. In a different time zone the same expression fires at a different instant, and around a daylight-saving change it can fire twice or be skipped.
01What to check
- Which time zone the scheduler evaluates the expression in.
- How the system behaves on the spring-forward and fall-back transitions.
- Whether the job should run in UTC to avoid local-time surprises.
Sources
- crontab(5) — Linux manual page — man7.org (accessed 2026-09-01)