How do I find the current system timezone?

Question

On Linux, I need to find the currently configured timezone as an Olson location. I want my (C or C++) code to be portable to as many Linux systems as possible.

For example. I live in London, so my current Olson location is "Europe/London". I'm not interested in timezone IDs like "BST", "EST" or whatever.

Debian and Ubuntu have a file /etc/timezone that contains this information, but I don't think I can rely on that file always being there, can I? Gnome has a function oobs_time_config_get_timezone() which also returns the right string, but I want my code to work on systems without Gnome.

So, what's the best general way to get the currently configured timezone as an Olson location, on Linux?

Answer 1

It's hard to get a reliable answer. Relying on things like /etc/timezone may be the best bet.

(The variable tzname and the tm_zone member of struct tm, as suggested in other answers, typically contains an abbreviation such as GMT/BST etc, rather than the Olson time string as requested in the question).

• On Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu), /etc/timezone is a file containing the right answer.
• On some Redhat-based systems (including at least some versions of CentOS, RHEL, Fedora), you can get the required information using readlink() on /etc/localtime, which is a symlink to (for example) /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London.
• OpenBSD seems to use the same scheme as RedHat.

However, there are some issues with the above approaches. The /usr/share/zoneinfo directory also contains files such as GMT and GB, so it's possible the user may configure the symlink to point there.

Also there's nothing to stop the user copying the right timezone file there instead of creating a symlink.

One possibility to get round this (which seems to work on Debian, RedHat and OpenBSD) is to compare the contents of the /etc/localtime file to the files under /usr/share/zoneinfo, and see which ones match:

eta:~% md5sum /etc/localtime
410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8  /etc/localtime
eta:~% find /usr/share/zoneinfo -type f | xargs md5sum | grep 410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8
410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8  /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London
410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8  /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Belfast
410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8  /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Guernsey
410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8  /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Jersey
410c65079e6d14f4eedf50c19bd073f8  /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Isle_of_Man
...
...

Of course the disadvantage is that this will tell you all timezones that are identical to the current one. (That means identical in the full sense - not just "currently at the same time", but also "always change their clocks on the same day as far as the system knows".)

Your best bet may be to combine the above methods: use /etc/timezone if it exists; otherwise try parsing /etc/localtime as a symlink; if that fails, search for matching timezone definition files; if that fails - give up and go home ;-)

(And I have no idea whether any of the above applies on AIX...)

Answer 2

Pretty late in the day, but I was looking for something similar and found that ICU library has the provision to get the Olson timezone ID: http://userguide.icu-project.org/datetime/timezone

It is now installed on most linux distributions (install the libicu-dev package or equivalent). Code:

#include <unicode/timezone.h>
#include <iostream>

using namespace U_ICU_NAMESPACE;

int main() {
  TimeZone* tz = TimeZone::createDefault();
  UnicodeString us;
  tz->getID(us);
  std::string s;
  us.toUTF8String(s);
  std::cout << "Current timezone ID: " << s << '\n';
  delete tz;

  return 0;
}

And to get the abbreviated/POSIX timezone names (should also work on Windows):

#include <time.h>

int main() {
  time_t ts = 0;
  struct tm t;
  char buf[16];
  ::localtime_r(&ts, &t);
  ::strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%z", &t);
  std::cout << "Current timezone (POSIX): " << buf << std::endl;
  ::strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%Z", &t);
  std::cout << "Current timezone: " << buf << std::endl;

Answer 3

I liked the post made by psmears and implemented this script to read the first output of the list. Of course there must have more elegant ways of doing this, but there you are...

    /**
     * Returns the (Linux) server default timezone abbreviation
     * To be used when no user is logged in (Ex.: batch job)
     * Tested on Fedora 12
     * 
     * @param void
     * @return String (Timezone abbreviation Ex.: 'America/Sao_Paulo')
     */
    public function getServerTimezone()
    {

        $shell = 'md5sum /etc/localtime';
        $q = shell_exec($shell);
        $shell = 'find /usr/share/zoneinfo -type f | xargs md5sum | grep ' . substr($q, 0, strpos($q, '/') - 2);
        $q = shell_exec($shell);
        $q = substr($q, strpos($q, 'info/') + 5, strpos($q, " "));
        return substr($q, 0, strpos($q, chr(10)));

    }

In my Brazilian Fedora 12, it returns:
Brazil/East

And does exactly what I need.

Thank you psmears

Answer 4

I see two major linux cases:

1. Ubuntu. There should be a /etc/timezone file. This file should only contain the timezone and nothing else.
2. Red Hat. There should be a /etc/sysconfig/clock that contains something like: ZONE="America/Chicago"

In addition, Solaris should have an /etc/TIMEZONE file that contains a line like: TZ=US/Mountain

So based on the above, here is some straight C that I believe answers the OP's question. I have tested it on Ubuntu, CentOS (Red Hat), and Solaris (bonus).

#include <string.h>
#include <strings.h>
#include <stdio.h>

char *findDefaultTZ(char *tz, size_t tzSize);
char *getValue(char *filename, char *tag, char *value, size_t valueSize);

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  char tz[128];

  if (findDefaultTZ(tz, sizeof(tz)))
    printf("Default timezone is %s.\n", tz);
  else
    printf("Unable to determine default timezone.\n");
  return 0;
}


char *findDefaultTZ(char *tz, size_t tzSize)
{
  char *ret = NULL;
  /* If there is an /etc/timezone file, then we expect it to contain
   * nothing except the timezone. */
  FILE *fd = fopen("/etc/timezone", "r"); /* Ubuntu. */
  if (fd)
  {
    char buffer[128];
    /* There should only be one line, in this case. */
    while (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), fd))
    {
      char *lasts = buffer;
      /* We don't want a line feed on the end. */
      char *tag = strtok_r(lasts, " \t\n", &lasts);
      /* Idiot check. */
      if (tag && strlen(tag) > 0 && tag[0] != '#')
      {
        strncpy(tz, tag, tzSize);
        ret = tz;
      }
    }
    fclose(fd);
  }
  else if (getValue("/etc/sysconfig/clock", "ZONE", tz, tzSize)) /* Redhat.    */
    ret = tz;
  else if (getValue("/etc/TIMEZONE", "TZ", tz, tzSize))     /* Solaris. */
    ret = tz;
  return ret;
}

/* Look for tag=someValue within filename.  When found, return someValue
 * in the provided value parameter up to valueSize in length.  If someValue
 * is enclosed in quotes, remove them. */
char *getValue(char *filename, char *tag, char *value, size_t valueSize)
{
  char buffer[128], *lasts;
  int foundTag = 0;

  FILE *fd = fopen(filename, "r");
  if (fd)
  {
    /* Process the file, line by line. */
    while (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), fd))
    {
      lasts = buffer;
      /* Look for lines with tag=value. */
      char *token = strtok_r(lasts, "=", &lasts);
      /* Is this the tag we are looking for? */
      if (token && !strcmp(token, tag))
      {
        /* Parse out the value. */
        char *zone = strtok_r(lasts, " \t\n", &lasts);
        /* If everything looks good, copy it to our return var. */
        if (zone && strlen(zone) > 0)
        {
          int i = 0;
          int j = 0;
          char quote = 0x00;
          /* Rather than just simple copy, remove quotes while we copy. */
          for (i = 0; i < strlen(zone) && i < valueSize - 1; i++)
          {
            /* Start quote. */
            if (quote == 0x00 && zone[i] == '"')
              quote = zone[i];
            /* End quote. */
            else if (quote != 0x00 && quote == zone[i])
              quote = 0x00;
            /* Copy bytes. */
            else
            {
              value[j] = zone[i];
              j++;
            }
          }
          value[j] = 0x00;
          foundTag = 1;
        }
        break;
      }
    }
    fclose(fd);
  }
  if (foundTag)
    return value;
  return NULL;
}

Answer 5

FWIW, RHEL/Fedora/CentOS have /etc/sysconfig/clock:

ZONE="Europe/Brussels"
UTC=true
ARC=false

Answer 6

There is no standard c or c++ function for this. However, GNU libc has an extention. its struct tm has two extra members:

long tm_gmtoff;           /* Seconds east of UTC */
const char *tm_zone;      /* Timezone abbreviation */

This means that if you use one of the functions which populates a struct tm (such as localtime or gmtime) you can use these extra fields. This is of course only if you are using GNU libc (and a sufficiently recent version of it).

Also many systems have a int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv, struct timezone *tz); function (POSIX) which will fill in a struct timezone. This has the following fields:

struct timezone {
    int tz_minuteswest;     /* minutes west of Greenwich */
    int tz_dsttime;         /* type of DST correction */
};

Not exactly what you asked for, but close...