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Linux timezone

The kernel's timezone is set by hwclock. Apparently, however, almost nobody cares what the kernel thinks what timezone it is in.

Programs that need the local time usually rely on more traditional ways to determine the timezone: The TZ environment variable or /etc/localtime (see man tzset). A noteable exceptions are filesystems that seem to use the kernel timezone.

The kernel's timezone consists of two parts (fields):

tz_minutes_west that specifies how many minutes the local time lags behind UTC (not adjusted for DST)
tz_dsttime to indicate the type of daylight savings time (DST) (Always zero in Linux(?), see man 2 settimeofday)

Listing timezones

Available timezones will be shown with

timedatectl --list-timezones

Temporarily show the date in a different timezone

The time zone can temporarily be set by changing the TZ environment variable:

TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Antarctica/Palmer date

See also faketime and the *datefudge utilities.