June 2014 1 post

Here's how to change the time zone in CentOS. This should work on both CentOS 5 and 6.

First, determine the correct timezone. You can do this using tzselect (which just outputs some text and doesn't save anything), or by looking in /usr/share/zoneinfo for the right file. I'm on Pacific time, so for me it would be America/Los_Angeles.

Now, back up your existing time zone file:

# mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak

Then symlink the desired zoneinfo file to localtime:

# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime

Now if you run date, the appropriate time zone should be displayed. There is one more step though. Open up the file /etc/sysconfig/clock and edit it to reflect the appropriate zone. For example:

ZONE="America/Los_Angeles"

Without this change, /etc/localtime will get overwritten and will revert to the previous time zone after yum or rpm updates tzdata.