Ensuring that your account is configured to run with appropriate time zone information can make your life a lot easier.
Of course, if you administer your own system then you can simply set your system time to local time. However, it’s generally a better idea to set system time to Universal Time (UTC) and then configure time zone information on a per-user basis.
Why does this make sense? Well, suppose that you have remote users logging onto your system. It’s very likely that a remote user will be operating in a different time zone and it’d be handy for them to have system time converted into their local time.
There’s a handy utility for putting this in place: tzselect. It presents a couple of simple menus and then delivers a small chunk of code that you’d include in a user’s .profile file to ensure that their time zone is configured correctly.
Here’s an example of selecting the time zone for South Africa.
$ tzselect
Please identify a location so that time zone rules can be set correctly.
Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", or "TZ".
1) Africa
2) Americas
3) Antarctica
4) Asia
5) Atlantic Ocean
6) Australia
7) Europe
8) Indian Ocean
9) Pacific Ocean
10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates.
11) TZ - I want to specify the time zone using the Posix TZ format.
#? 1
Please select a country whose clocks agree with yours.
1) Algeria 20) Gambia 39) Sao Tome & Principe
2) Angola 21) Ghana 40) Senegal
3) Benin 22) Guinea 41) Sierra Leone
4) Botswana 23) Guinea-Bissau 42) Somalia
5) Burkina Faso 24) Kenya 43) South Africa
6) Burundi 25) Lesotho 44) South Sudan
7) Cameroon 26) Liberia 45) Spain
8) Central African Rep. 27) Libya 46) St Helena
9) Chad 28) Madagascar 47) Sudan
10) Comoros 29) Malawi 48) Swaziland
11) Congo (Dem. Rep.) 30) Mali 49) Tanzania
12) Congo (Rep.) 31) Mauritania 50) Togo
13) Côte d'Ivoire 32) Mayotte 51) Tunisia
14) Djibouti 33) Morocco 52) Uganda
15) Egypt 34) Mozambique 53) Western Sahara
16) Equatorial Guinea 35) Namibia 54) Zambia
17) Eritrea 36) Niger 55) Zimbabwe
18) Ethiopia 37) Nigeria
19) Gabon 38) Rwanda
#? 43
The following information has been given:
South Africa
Therefore TZ='Africa/Johannesburg' will be used.
Local time is now: Mon Aug 21 05:06:15 SAST 2017.
Universal Time is now: Mon Aug 21 03:06:15 UTC 2017.
Is the above information OK?
1) Yes
2) No
#? 1
You can make this change permanent for yourself by appending the line
TZ='Africa/Johannesburg'; export TZ
to the file '.profile' in your home directory; then log out and log in again.
Here is that TZ value again, this time on standard output so that you
can use the /usr/bin/tzselect command in shell scripts:
Africa/JohannesburgTo configure my account with this time zone information, I’d simply add
TZ='Africa/Johannesburg'; export TZto my .profile file. It would come into effect the next time I logged into the system.