How to Change Timezone on CentOS/RHEL 7/6/5

Sometimes we forgot to set timezone properly for newly installed system or sometimes we need to change timezone of systems for various testing etc. Under CentOS/RHEL systems all timezone settings file are located under /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory and /etc/localtime is the file use is used by operating system to set current timezone for system. So the best way to change time zone of server is to link /etc/localtime file to correct configuration file under /usr/share/zoneinfo/ files.

First check current timezone used by your system using date command.

[[email protected] ~]# date

Fri Jan 2 05:10:00 EST 2015

As per above example our system timezone is set to EST.

Change TimeZone in CentOS/RHEL 7

In CentOS/RHEL 7 we use timedatectl command to change current timezone of system. First use following command to list all timezones

# timedatectl list-timezones

Now use following command to change timezone to America/Los_Angeles.

# timedatectl set-timezone America/Los_Angeles

Change TimeZone in CentOS/RHEL 6/5

To change timezone on CentOS/RHEL 6/5 we can simply link /etc/localtime file with correct timezone configuration file. For example we are setting America/Los_Angeles as our local system timezone.

# mv /etc/localtime /root/localtime.old
# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime

Your timezone has been changed successfully. Lets check timezone again.

[[email protected] ~]# date

Fri Jan 2 14:10:54 IST 2015