Shane Rainville
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How to Check and Set Timezone in CentOS 8

Overview

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check and set your Timezone in CentOS.

The timedatectl command is a relatively new addition to Systemd distributions, and provides a much simpler interface for viewing and adjusting a server’s date and time.

CentOS and RedHat still use symbolically linked files to set the system’s timezone. You will also learn how to view this linked file and how to update your timezone by changing the link.

Check Current Timezone with Timedatectl

To get detailed information your CentOS server’s date, time, and timezone you use the timedatectl command. In the example below, we can see the server’s time zone is America/New_York, and the offset is -0400.

timedatectl
               Local time: Fri 2020-09-04 23:44:41 EDT
           Universal time: Sat 2020-09-05 03:44:41 UTC
                 RTC time: Sat 2020-09-05 03:44:39
                Time zone: America/New_York (EDT, -0400)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

Setting Timezone with Timedatectl

In order to set your timezone you should probably list the available zones. You can view a list of supported timezones using the timedatectl list-timezones command.

timedatectl list-timezones
Africa/Abidjan
Africa/Accra
Africa/Addis_Ababa
Africa/Algiers
Africa/Asmara
Africa/Bamako
Africa/Bangui
Africa/Banjul
Africa/Bissau
Africa/Blantyre
Africa/Brazzaville
Africa/Bujumbura
Africa/Cairo
Africa/Casablanca
Africa/Ceuta
Africa/Conakry
Africa/Dakar
Africa/Dar_es_Salaam
Africa/Djibouti
Africa/Douala
...

The list is fairly comprehensive. You could browse the list by piping the timedatectl command into the less command.

If you have an idea which timezone you want, you can pipe timedatectl into the grep command.

timedatectl list-timezones | grep America
...
America/Noronha
America/North_Dakota/Beulah
America/North_Dakota/Center
America/North_Dakota/New_Salem
America/Nuuk
America/Ojinaga
America/Panama
America/Pangnirtung
America/Paramaribo
America/Phoenix
America/Port-au-Prince
America/Port_of_Spain
America/Porto_Velho
America/Puerto_Rico
America/Punta_Arenas
America/Rainy_River
America/Rankin_Inlet
America/Recife
...

Once you have the timezone you want to set the system to, you use the timedatectl set-timezone command with the name of the timezone. For example, to set the server’s timezone to America/Phoenix, you would run the following command.

sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Phoenix

Setting Timezone with Symbolic Link

The timezone on a RedHat and CentOS server is stored set by the /etc/localtime file. This file is actually a symbolic link to a timezone file under /usr/share/zoneinfo.

To get a basic view of the timezone you can ls the file to it’s symbolic link.

ls -la /etc/localtime
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  41 30 Aug 22:12 /etc/localtime -> /var/db/timezone/zoneinfo/America/Toronto

In the example above, we can see the /etc/localtime file is symbolically linked to the America/Toronto timezone file.

To change the timezone, replace the symbolic link with that of the correct timezone file for your server.

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Phoenix

The ln command is used to create file links, while the -s flag is used to set the link type as symbolic and the -f flag forces the creation, which is required to update an existing link.

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