How to solve time zone warning when submitting batch jobs?

Every time when I submit a batch job, for example "job=batch('testme','Pool',31)", I end up with this kind of warning. Is there anyway to fix it, preferably outside matlab so that users don't have to run extra timezone setting code in matlab? I have Matlab R2016b on Ubuntu Linux server.

                     ID: 32
                  State: finished
               Function: @distcomp.nop
                 Parent: Job 8
          StartDateTime: 17-Nov-2016 14:51:45
       Running Duration: 0 days 0h 0m 13s

                  Error: 
               Warnings: The system time zone setting, 'US/Eastern', does not specify a single time zone 
                         unambiguously. It will be treated as 'America/New_York'. See the datetime.TimeZone property for 
                         details about specifying time zones.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime

[Junjun]

Tried, and restarted matlab. Matlab still complains about EST time. The warning doesn't show up if I just delete /etc/localtime file though.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Current default time zone: 'America/New_York'
Local time is now:      Thu Nov 17 16:19:29 EST 2016.
Universal Time is now:  Thu Nov 17 21:19:29 UTC 2016.

[Walter Roberson]

I would check to see if your bashrc or equivalent is setting the timezone. Does

getenv('TZ')

show anything from inside MATLAB? If it does then TZ has been set in the shell environment.

[Junjun]

Yes. This solved the issue.

In Linux terminal window, "echo $TZ" shows nothing. Then I did this

jmao@poincare:~$ export TZ=America/New_York
jmao@poincare:~$ echo $TZ
America/New_York

After that I started matlab, and get this

getenv('TZ')
ans =
America/New_York

And the job finished without warning.

[Peter Perkins]

MATLAB is perhaps a bit stricter about this than other software, but US/Eastern is an old-style specification that was, I think, deprecated a couple of decades ago, because it is not specific enough. Ask a Hoosier. But I think some maybe Linux dist'ns still use it as the default setting.

Setting the TZ environment var is the easiest way to avoid this. Another possibility might be to turn off the warning in a startup file.