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43

I have a virtual machine that is set to PST that a couple of colleagues have in different timezones. If I wanted to change the time-zone to EST and GMT, what do I need to do?

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up vote 137 down vote accepted

Use timedatectl

sudo timedatectl set-timezone <timeszone>

The best part - it's not interactive as dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

set timezone as EST:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone EST

set timezone as UTC:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone UTC

list all timezones:

timedatectl list-timezones
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1  
Not a fan of +1 comments, but am putting one here since this worked for me in the best way. I was wanting a single one-line command line tool to change the timezone, rather than wanting to launch some whole either menu or gui program (I don't know what tzdata does, how it works, but I don't need to with this one line command). Thanks! – Phil Ryan Jun 1 '15 at 23:21
    
works like a charm ;) – user332660 Feb 24 '16 at 10:01
    
Interestingly, it is doing something a little different than tzdata. I had an issue with Java time being different than the system time after applying a patch. Tzdata didn't work to fix the issue, but this did. – Daniel Bower Mar 23 '16 at 15:54
1  
this didn't work for me; however the dpkg-reconfigure did the trick. – Antti Haapala Apr 10 '16 at 11:39
    
@AnttiHaapala on which OS & version? – Jossef Harush Apr 10 '16 at 11:40
up vote 197 down vote

Execute the following command:

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

A menu based tool should be started that allows you to change the timezone.

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4  
It's worth mentioning that not all services will use the updated TZ (ex: cron), if possible restart the machine, or at least manually restart the services you know will need to use the updated TZ. – Radu Maris Oct 15 '14 at 19:21
up vote 23 down vote

The following also work. For GMT:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime

For EST:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST /etc/localtime
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6  
I think it would be better to link one of the city files rather than GMT or EST, as then they will keep track of daylight savings time, whereas linking (e.g.) GMT will not change the system time to reflect when daylight savings is in effect in your city. e.g.: ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime – Asfand Qazi Jun 8 '15 at 9:19
up vote 15 down vote

As root you have to execute:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

A menu based tool should be started that allows you to change the timezone.

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up vote 10 down vote

The most ease way especially to a server is to list timezones:

timedatectl list-timezones

And choose yours, for example:

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Athens

Thats it! , :-)

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up vote 4 down vote

To run one program with a different time zone setting, set the TZ environment variable, e.g. run TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date to see what time it is on Christmas Island, or export TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati to have the setting last for a shell session.

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up vote 3 down vote

Edit the timezone file at the /etc folder as:

Etc/GMT

You can use the next format:

Region "/" City

Example of /etc/timezone:

Europe/Athens

or

Europe/Paris
Europe/London

You may experiment with the: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and check cat the timezone file.

You must reboot or start again a service (not the ntp service). I do not know which one. If somebody knows please share with us. (Tested on Ubuntu 15.10 the change is taken into account instantly)

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up vote 0 down vote

cp -p /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Pacific /etc/localtime

I recommend AGAINST linking like mentioned by others. If some script accidentally over writes your /etc/localtime file, then it overwrites your Pacific timezone file... and it's a bit of a pain to replace it.

Just copy the Pacific file over the localtime file with the command above.

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