If you want to get the time zone abbreviation, use the following command:

date +%Z

If you want the full time zone name, use the following command instead:

timedatectl show | grep ^Timezone= | perl -pe 's/^Timezone=(\S+)$/$1/'

There are other methods for getting the time zone. But they depend either on the environment variable $TZ (which may not be set), or on the statically configured “/etc/timezone” file which might be out of sync with the system time zone file “/etc/localtime”.

It’s important to note that the Linux system utilities reference the “/etc/localtime” file (not “/etc/timezone”) when working with the system time. Here is a proof:

$ strace -e trace=file date
execve("/bin/date", ["date"], 0x7ffda462e360 /* 67 vars */) = 0
access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/localtime", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
Sat 04 Feb 2023 10:33:35 AM EET
+++ exited with 0 +++

The “/etc/timezone” file is a static helper that is set up when “/etc/localtime” is configured. Typically, “/etc/localtime” and “/etc/timezone” are in sync so it shouldn’t matter which one you query. However, I prefer to use the source of truth.