LOCALTIME(5)
✨ NAME ✨
localtime — the Local timezone configuration file 💖 (yes bestie, the one that decides what time it is where you are)
🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸
/etc/localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/...🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋
Okay so the /etc/localtime file? It's literally the thing that sets your system-wide timezone for the local system — the one all your apps use when they show a time to a human 🫶.
It should be an absolute or relative symbolic link pointing at /usr/share/zoneinfo/, and then after that a timezone identifier like "Europe/Berlin" or "Etc/UTC" 🌍. And the link that comes out of all that should lead to the matching binary tzfile(5) timezone data for whatever timezone you configured. Chain complete, slay ✨.
Not me about to drop the important part: because the timezone identifier gets extracted from the symlink target name of /etc/localtime, this file may not be a normal file or hardlink. Like, no. It just can't. 💀
If /etc/localtime is missing entirely? No stress, the default "UTC" timezone gets used 🌈.
Wanna override it for just one program instead of the whole system? You can, with the $TZ environment variable 👑. Peep environ(7) for the deets.
And if you want to change the settings of this file from the command line while the system is actually running (runtime, live, main character energy), you can use timedatectl(1) 💅. Got a mounted-but-not-booted system image and need to set up its time zone? That's systemd-firstboot(1)'s whole moment 🎀.
🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚
That's the whole page bestie, no cap 🎀 This cutie is from systemd 262.1, dated LOCALTIME(5) — go forth and set your timezone correctly 💜✨
📦 where this page comes from
- arch rolling: systemd 262.1-1 · LGPL-2.1-or-later AND CC0-1.0 AND GPL-2.0-or-later AND MIT-0
- 💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms