Q. How do I configure or change timezone under OpenBSD operating system?
A. All of the time zones OpenBSD supports are in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory tree. You need to create symlink to /etc/localtime file.
=> /usr/share/zoneinfo - time zone information directory
=> /etc/localtime - local time zone file
=> /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules - used with POSIX-style TZ's (generally not required)
=> /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT - for UTC leap seconds
Here is my current timezone - set to Asia / Calcutta (GMT +5:30):
$ ls -l /etc/localtime
Sample output:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 33 Sep 19 2007 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Calcutta
How do I change time zone?
You'll see several subdirectories for various countries or continents, each containing either city names or local time zones.
# ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/
Sample output:
Africa Atlantic Canada EST5EDT Factory GMT-0 Iceland Japan MST7MDT Navajo Portugal UCT WET zone.tab America Australia Chile Egypt GB GMT0 Indian Kwajalein Mexico PRC ROC US Zulu Antarctica Brazil Cuba Eire GB-Eire Greenwich Iran Libya Mideast PST8PDT ROK UTC posix Arctic CET EET Etc GMT HST Israel MET NZ Pacific Singapore Universal posixrules Asia CST6CDT EST Europe GMT+0 Hongkong Jamaica MST NZ-CHAT Poland Turkey W-SU right
Find the file for the time zone you like or for a city whose time zone you share. To set the time zone, just create a new symbolic link to the file from /etc/localtime.
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the info, it useful for me.It is very clean and easy to understand.
this is absolutely wrong.
man zic, and man localtime
@ Dan:
Really? Someone should contact this site to have this page updated then:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#TimeZone