How to check which timezone in Linux?

Question

Is there a way to check which time zone I'm currently in on Linux?

Answer 1

Usually, the TZ environment variable will tell you something useful. However, it is best to use functions such as mktime() and localtime() to convert between time_t and a local timezone representation. That is, don't try to do the conversion yourself.

Answer 2

If you mean from the console, just type:

date +%Z

Answer 3

If you want the numeric timezone:

date +'%:z %Z'

Sample output:

-05:00 EST

Answer 4

I wanted to find the timezone in "US/Eastern" or "Europe/London" form instead. You can find this in:

• /etc/timezone (present on Ubuntu and Red Hat? but not e.g. Amazon Linux)
• (on Red Hat style systems) as ZONE="US/Eastern" in /etc/sysconfig/clock

• or you can try and match /etc/localtime to one of the files under /usr/share/zoneinfo; annoyingly this doesn't seem to be a symlink, but you can e.g.

  cd /usr/share/zoneinfo
  find * -type f -exec sh -c "diff -q /etc/localtime '{}' > /dev/null && echo {}" \;

  to find matching files - there's probably better ways to do that, but that works. There will be multiple matches.

Answer 5

For ubuntu try this :

$ cat /etc/timezone

Sample output :

Asia/Kolkata

For other distro Reference : https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/110522/timezone-setting-in-linux

Answer 6

Sometimes you may be looking for the canonical timezone rather than the short form as produced by date %Z e.g. US/Eastern. On systems with timedatectl e.g. Fedora, timedatectl outputs lots of useful information, including the current zone:

# timedatectl
      Local time: Tue 2016-09-13 17:10:26 EDT
  Universal time: Tue 2016-09-13 21:10:26 UTC
        RTC time: Tue 2016-09-13 21:10:26
       Time zone: US/Eastern (EDT, -0400)
 Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: yes
 RTC in local TZ: no

Unfortunately, timedatectl takes set-timezone as a command, but has no corresponding get-timezone. Parse it as follows:

# timedatectl status | grep "zone" | sed -e 's/^[ ]*Time zone: \(.*\) (.*)$/\1/g'`
US/Eastern

Answer 7

$ strings /etc/localtime | tail -n 1
MST7MDT,M3.2.0,M11.1.0

So I'm on Mountain Time. Although advices above on using environment variable or just date command output sometimes work better, depending how you want to use that.

Answer 8

For the time zone, you can use geolocation:

$ curl https://ipapi.co/timezone
America/Chicago

Or:

$ curl http://ip-api.com/line?fields=timezone
America/Chicago

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/time#Time_zone

Answer 9

• /etc/sysconfig/clock sets whether the hardware clock is stored as UTC or local time.
• Symlink /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/... to set your timezone.
• Type /sbin/hwclock --systohc [--utc] to set the hardware clock.

The Linux kernel always stores and calculates time as the number of seconds since midnight of the 1st of January 1970 UTC regardless of whether your hardware clock is stored as UTC or not. Conversions to your local time are done at run-time. One neat thing about this is that if someone is using your computer from a different timezone, they can set the TZ environment variable and all dates and times will appear correct for their timezone.

If the number of seconds since the 1st of January 1970 UTC is stored as an signed 32-bit integer (as it is on your Linux/Intel system), your clock will stop working sometime on the year 2038. Linux has no inherent Y2K problem, but it does have a year 2038 problem. Hopefully we'll all be running Linux on 64-bit systems by then. 64-bit integers will keep our clocks running quite well until aproximately the year 292271-million.

Answer 10

A couple of solutions:

date +"%Z %z"
timedatectl | grep "Time zone"
cat /etc/timezone

gave me (respectively):

UTC +0000
Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000)
Etc/UTC

My computer is on UTC.

Answer 11

Using TZ or date IS NOT RELIABLE because it tells you the USER's timezone, not the default system timezone.

The default system timezone is stored in /etc/timezone (which is often a symbolic link to the timezone data file specific to the timezone). If you do not have an /etc/timezone, look at /etc/localtime. Generally that is the "server's" timezone. /etc/localtime is often a symlink to a timezone file in /usr/share/zoneinfo. That path to the correct timezone file will often give you geography information as well.

Newer linux have "timedatectl" which gives you tons of info when the command is run.

(as a side-node, if you have an ancient system that still uses the OLD hard-coded timezones, you can probably copy a modern timezone file onto it and it will work. I have had to do this many times to resolve changing timezones on older equipment).

Answer 12

Sometimes timedatectl set-timezone doesn't update /etc/timezone, so it's best to get the tiemzone from the name of the file that the symlink /etc/timezone points to:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

if filename=$(readlink /etc/localtime); then
    # /etc/localtime is a symlink as expected
    timezone=${filename#*zoneinfo/}
    if [[ $timezone = "$filename" || ! $timezone =~ ^[^/]+/[^/]+$ ]]; then
        # not pointing to expected location or not Region/City
        >&2 echo "$filename points to an unexpected location"
        exit 1
    fi
    echo "$timezone"
else  # compare files by contents
    # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12521114/getting-the-canonical-time-zone-name-in-shell-script#comment88637393_12523283
    find /usr/share/zoneinfo -type f ! -regex ".*/Etc/.*" -exec \
        cmp -s {} /etc/localtime \; -print | sed -e 's@.*/zoneinfo/@@' | head -n1
fi

References: in this answer.

Answer 13

You can show date and the timezone concurrently:

date +'%d/%m/%Y  %H:%M:%S [%:z  %Z]'