How to Change Timezone on CentOS/RHEL 8/7/6

Sometimes we forgot to set timezone properly for newly installed systems or sometimes we need to change the 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 the time zone of the 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

Mon Oct 14 11:04:38 EST 2019

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

Change TimeZone in CentOS/RHEL 8/7

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. Let’s check the timezone again.

[[email protected] ~]# date

Mon Oct 14 04:05:08 PDT 2019