How to check computer's timezone through Terminal?

Question

I am writing a bash script which at some point needs to determine a user's timezone, so how exactly can I check the timezone in Terminal? I would like to be able to get output in terms of GMT and UTC. Though if I can get the output in terms of any others then a list of those and how to get them would be nice. I am running Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18.

Answer 1

Use:

timedatectl status | grep "Time zone"

Without the grep you get a lot more of information.

As pointed out by @Christian Ulbrich in comment the wording for timezone seems to change depending on which version of timaedatectl or systemd you are using (on 14.04.5 it seems to be Timezone written in one word), so to make sure you get the proper output, you can run the above command without piping through grep to make sure you grep the right thing.

Here an example output of the above timedatectl status command on 18.04 without piping it through to grep: