Set debian Linux Timezone via command line

Question

Is there a way i can set the current timezone via the commandline/terminal? Its for a shelle script so im looking for some, hopefully, one liner like date -Z 'Europe/London' (Just an example), in other words just a command to write and not anyhting todo with graphics

Is there any built in way of doing it ?

Answer 1

This works on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, I think most Debian-based distros...

echo "America/Eastern" | sudo tee /etc/timezone
sudo dpkg-reconfigure --frontend noninteractive tzdata

Where to find timezones:

• See this Wikipedia link on the tz database for other timezones to use
• Sources for Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data lists more sources, like TWiki.org Service: Date and Time Gateway - Timezone Selector
• Looking at /usr/share/zoneinfo/ shows zones that should work. Most are "Country/City" in "folder/folder" format, but if you pick a "plain" zone like MST, it may not set the daylight savings time info.

Or (as commented) use timedatectl list-timezones to find a zone, then timedatectl set-timezone [timezone]

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If required, see this Debian page about Time Zone Changes. You could use the program zic along with changing some files, if you wanted to change the details of the time zone, like daylight savings time start & end dates, etc.

Answer 2

You can change it with more than one line. Exactly two lines.

1. mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.old

and then Link your TimeZone file like this:

2. ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europa/London /etc/localtime

You can check with date