TZ environment
Hi,
have some troubles regarding the timezone settings on a bunch of servers, running RHEL5.9.
The servers are located in Austria / CET, so I did the following timezone-configuration:
TZ=GMT+1
export TZ
Sadly, this setting does something wrong. The servers are now 1 hour behind GMT / 2 hours behind the local time (azores timezone).
I did a further test:
TZ=GMT-1
export TZ
Responses
For server-wide settings, you need to link /etc/localtime to the appropriate /usr/share/zoneinfo file. Use the time-configuration utility to make life easy on yourself. Setting TZ in a shell initilization script only effects the shell (and subhells) that sourced that initialization script.
Quoting "info libc 'Date and Time' 'Calendar Time' 'TZ Variable'":
The OFFSET specifies the time value you must add to the local time
to get a Coordinated Universal Time value. It has syntax like
[`+'|`-']HH[`:'MM[`:'SS]]. This is positive if the local time zone is
west of the Prime Meridian and negative if it is east. The hour must
be between `0' and `23', and the minute and seconds between `0' and
`59'.
Yes, this may be counterintuitive, but unfortunately this is what was codified in the relevant standard (POSIX.1).
I would recommend just setting TZ=Europe/Vienna instead.. no need to worry about the sign and having to update for daylight saving time.
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