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Asked: 2011-03-25 01:40:27 +0800 CST

how to read time zone information

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I was looking at some book of system programming. It mentioned to use a variable TZ with a colon separated list which is used from /usr/share/zoneinfo. Probably the book is a bit outdated.

I checked on my Ubuntu system 

/usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia$ file Oral

gives following output

Oral: timezone data, version 2, 14 gmt time flags, 14 std time flags, no leap seconds, 51 transition times, 14 abbreviation chars

I tried opening it in vi but the text could not be read. I also tried reading /etc/localtime but here also it could not be read.

  1. How can I basically read above type of files?

  2. Where is TZ environment variable defined in Ubuntu 10.04?

time

1 Answers

  1. Well, it depends what you want to read it for?

    Almost all programs just rely on $TZ being set in the environment or /etc/localtime being a link to a timezone file. The C library will then automatically arrange for eg localtime() to return the correct time.

    1) How can I basically read above type of files

    zdump -v /etc/localtime will show you what's inside the files.

    These are compiled files not meant for humans to read. apt-get source tzdata will give you the source they come from.

    2) Where is TZ environment variable defined in Ubuntu 10.04

    It is not set by default. Instead, /etc/localtime is a copy of the relevant zoneinfo file, and /etc/timezone is the name of that zone.

    You can change them with sudo tzconfig or through the GUI.

    You could set it in for instance ~/.env if you want a different personal default for yourself.

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