You need to use Popen
from the subprocess
module. An example (Windows 7, opening a cmd prompt)
>>> from subprocess import Popen
>>> Popen("start", shell=True)
<subprocess.Popen object at 0x02C199F0>
So, accordingly, you can execute your timezone commands in the prompt, through Python. (I could have given the full code, but apparently, that behavior is not good on SO (since you did not attempt the problem yourself).