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smusumeche
Asked: 2013-10-06 08:15:59 +0800 CST

CentOS Ignoring Timezone and showing UTC

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I've set my server's timezone to Central:

/etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central

After rebooting, when I run the date command, the time is still listed in UTC. 

[root@dev etc]# date
Sat Oct  5 16:14:28 UTC 2013

How can I get it to display in the local timezone?

linux

4 Answers

  1. Timekeeping tips for your CentOS system.

    • Set the timezone offset with something like: ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime
    • Check the contents of /etc/sysconfig/clock - Mine only contains ZONE="America/Chicago"
    • Turn on ntp. There's no excuse not to have it running.
    • If this is a physical system, you may want to set your hardware clock in your bios or set it from your OS with hwclock -w

    These changes take effect immediately, such that your date command should output:

    # date
Sat Oct  5 11:38:49 CDT 2013
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  2. Also make sure that the environment variable TZ is unset, as it overrides what is configured by /etc/localtime.

    Even an innocent export TZ= makes date (and other utilities) default to outputting UTC.

    Check /etc/environment, /etc/profile, /etc/bash.bashrc, ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, your Desktop Environment configuration and other commonly sourced configuration files for instances of setting and exporting TZ and remove them.

    Edit:

    Also check that your /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central is a valid existing file:

    $ file -L /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central
/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central: timezone data, version 2, 6 gmt time flags, 6 std time flags, no leap seconds, 235 transition times, 6 abbreviation chars
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  3. Best Answer

    You could check if there is something wrong with this file: /etc/localtime

    Using for example:

    zdump -v /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central or zdump -v /etc/localtime

    In my case the information for this year looks like this:

    /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central  Sun Mar 10 07:59:59 2013 UTC = Sun Mar 10 01:59:59 2013 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central  Sun Mar 10 08:00:00 2013 UTC = Sun Mar 10 03:00:00 2013 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central  Sun Nov  3 06:59:59 2013 UTC = Sun Nov  3 01:59:59 2013 CDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-18000
/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central  Sun Nov  3 07:00:00 2013 UTC = Sun Nov  3 01:00:00 2013 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=-21600
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  4. I had the exact same issue and updating tzdata fixed it for me:

    yum update tzdata
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