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Setting the timezone on CentOS

I forget this pretty much all the time, even though it’s a fairly simple operation. There are loads of timezone data files stored in:

/usr/share/zoneinfo

So for my CentOS install, to set my machine to London time, I use:

#
# this is not correct for me
#
$ date
Wed Oct  1 07:43:58 CDT 2008
#
# to fix it
#
$ sudo rm /etc/localtime
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
#
# now check it's ok
#
$ date
Wed Oct  1 12:42:33 GMT 2008

I imagine this works on Redhat and Fedora as well, but I can’t be sure on other Linux distros.

Tags: centos, howto, snippet, timezone

This entry was posted at 12:51 pm on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. It would be nice to read your comments below. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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There have been 10 responses to this post.

John Trupiano mentioned at 9:51 pm on October 14th, 2008
This was helpful to me. Thanks!
Jeremy Hoyland mentioned at 1:10 pm on November 4th, 2008
I linked in /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London to localtime on the theory that it might get me summertime.

I’ll find out in March!
Duncan replied at 10:19 am on April 3rd, 2009
@jeremy you’re right and I’ve swapped mine too
The Separator mentioned at 7:09 pm on January 12th, 2010
Fine instructions, thank you!
DDevine mentioned at 2:21 am on June 8th, 2010
I can confirm this works on CentOS 5.5. The directories are the same.
Brian Berlin mentioned at 9:16 pm on June 16th, 2010
Thank you sir!
Pedro mentioned at 9:25 pm on February 5th, 2011
Simple and very effective!
Alexios Koumouris mentioned at 12:46 pm on April 5th, 2011
Thank you very much. Just Works.!!!
Evgeny mentioned at 1:58 pm on April 5th, 2011
tnx ,very effective and helped me
Sergio mentioned at 1:57 pm on November 11th, 2011
Thanks! This was very usefull for me. I lost a lot of time trying to fix this problem. After I read your post, I fix it in 45 seconds.

Setting the timezone on CentOS

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There have been 10 responses to this post.

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