Changing Time Zones

[Kevin Buettner]

On Sep 12,  4:14pm, Simper, Brian D wrote:

> I have been looking through manuals and haven't found the answer to this
> yet.  How do you change your time zone in Linux?  I have a machine that is
> using UTC and I would like to change it to use regular time zone
> designations.  I am sure that it is just an entry in one of the /etc files
> but I haven't found which one yet.  Does anyone know offhand?

Copy one of the files from the /usr/share/zoneinfo hierarchy to
/etc/localtime.  E.g,

    cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/MST /etc/localtime

I seem to remember a time when /etc/localtime was merely a symlink
to one of the zoneinfo files, but apparently the standard practice
now is to make a copy.  I asked one of my colleagues about this
recently and found out that the reason for doing it this way is so
that you don't need /usr/share mounted in order to get the time
zone right when the system is starting up.

There is also the ZONE setting in /etc/sysconfig/clock, but I haven't
been able to find any startup scripts which use this setting.

Kevin