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dmckenna
Asked: 2012-05-18 06:22:39 +0800 CST

How do I change my timezone to UTC/GMT?

  • 772

Currently when I execute the date command from bash I get the following displayed

Thu May 17 12:21:00 IST 2012

Below is my timezone config based on executing dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

  Current default time zone: 'Europe/Dublin'
  Local time is now: Thu May 17 12:32:52 IST 2012.
  Universal Time is now: Thu May 17 11:32:52 UTC 2012.

Any idea how I change from IST to UTC/GMT?

configuration time timezone

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Any idea how I change from IST to GMT?

    To switch to UTC, simply execute sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata, scroll to the bottom of the Continents list and select Etc or None of the above; in the second list, select UTC. If you prefer GMT instead of UTC, it's just above UTC in that list. :)

    • 189 
  2. sudo timedatectl set-timezone UTC

    Will change your timezone to UTC system wide.

    You can do timedatectl list-timezones to see all the available timezones.

    excerpt from @MattJohnson's answer on SO

    Zones like Etc/GMT+6 are intentionally reversed for backwards compatibility with POSIX standards. See the comments in this file.

    You should almost never need to use these zones. Instead you should be using a fully named time zone like America/New_York or Europe/London or whatever is appropriate for your location. Refer to the list here.

    • 89

  3. In the old Un*x style (SunOS, HPUX...), you can do:

    ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

    Check the contents of /usr/share/zoneinfo to get the timezone you want/need.

    For instance, Irish Summer Time (IST) can be defined as

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3661 Mar 13 22:18 /usr/share/zoneinfo/posix/Eire

    or

    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Mar 13 22:18 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Dublin -> ../posix/Eire

    However, the most important is to use a proper clock reference and a ntp daemon (openntpd for instance), as timezone is only used for displaying/converting the time to strings, not to store it (whatever the timezone, difference to 01/01/1970 is everywhere the same on Earth).

    • 14

  4. Updated for 14.04 to present

    View Time and Date Status:

    $ timedatectl status
                      Local time: Sun 2018-07-29 15:26:03 BST
                  Universal time: Sun 2018-07-29 14:26:03 UTC
                        RTC time: Sun 2018-07-29 14:26:03
                       Time zone: Europe/London (BST, +0100)
       System clock synchronized: yes
systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes
                 RTC in local TZ: no

    View List of Timezones:
    Listed Timezones (425)

    $ timedatectl list-timezones
Africa/Abidjan
Africa/Accra
Africa/Addis_Ababa
...
Pacific/Tongatapu
Pacific/Wake
Pacific/Wallis
UTC

    Set Timezone to UTC:

    $ timedatectl set-timezone UTC

    View Time and Date Status:

    $ timedatectl status
                      Local time: Sun 2018-07-29 14:46:27 UTC
                  Universal time: Sun 2018-07-29 14:46:27 UTC
                        RTC time: Sun 2018-07-29 14:46:27
                       Time zone: UTC (UTC, +0000)
       System clock synchronized: yes
systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes
                 RTC in local TZ: no*
    • 9

  5. Something like this?

    $ date
Wed Jul 16 22:52:47 EDT 2014

$ cat /etc/timezone
America/New_York

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
$ service cron stop && service cron start
    • 6

  6. In case you need this for only a single command, say, ls, use this:

    TZ=UTC ls -l --full-time
    • 1