I didn't explain it correctly. The problem isn't that I'd have to modify 50 scripts for the new zone. The problem is that modifing the TZ environment variable might affect those scripts. You said that TZ only effects the Perl scrips and their children. I'm not sure if localizing the TZ environment variable like you did would olny make the varibale accessable by the local script (the script with the code in it) or if the others would pick it up. I only want my script to see it.