Setting timezones

Question

I want to set my timezone to America/New_York. date says that the current time is CEST. I'm using systemd, no desktop environment.

Right now I have

/etc/localtime links to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York
/etc/timezone set to "America/New_York"
/etc/rc.conf set to "America/New_York" (arch linux should be ignored by systemd)
$TZ is unset

Hardware clock is set to utc time and works fine.

TZ=utc date

gives the right output.

Unfortunately I'm still on CEST. Am I missing something?

Solution

Looks like /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York has incorrect content.

Try issuing zdump America/New_York or TZ=America/New_York date

Comments

[McEnroe]

[root@jupiter etc]# zdump /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York Tue Jul 3 19:20:40 2012 CEST Seems you're right ...

[McEnroe]

And I fixed it by re-installing tzdata. No idea how this could have happened. A corrupt file was the last thing I expected. Thanks!

[poige]

@McEnroe, That's why I would advice against symlinking to /usr/share/zoneinfo/. Actually, previously there was also such a reason due to problems with separate /usr partition layout making the link dangling until it got mounted finally during boot. Another one, as your issue shows is overwriting /etc/localtime would muck up original file as well. So, it's better to cp not ln…