Need long description timezone

mfoley · 07-09-2016, 12:33 AM

Is there a way to get the long description timezone in Slackware? For example "America/New_York", not just "EDT"

chris.willing · 07-09-2016, 01:46 AM

Maybe

Code:

ls -l /etc/localtime-copied-from

chris.willing · 07-09-2016, 01:51 AM

Or maybe better would be

Code:

ls -l /etc/localtime-copied-from | cut -d '/' -f 7-8

jamison20000e · 07-09-2016, 02:13 AM

Or:

Code:

tail -n 1 /etc/localtime*

unless the OP (Mfoley) can be more disruptive, are we talking in your clock? E.g: http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/clock

jamison20000e · 07-09-2016, 02:24 AM

In which case, perhaps:

Quote:

%c America, New York

mfoley · 07-10-2016, 12:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chris.willing

Maybe

Code:

ls -l /etc/localtime-copied-from

That may end up being the best I can do on Linux. In fact I was literally looking for "America/New_York" out there somewhere as that is the timezone designation used in ics (calendar) files in Outlook, Thunderbird Lightning and probably everyone's ics format. However, that doesn't mean it is a standard beyond ics.

For example, the Thunderbird error console gives: "Couldn't find (UTC-5:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)", for entries so marked.

I guess I can always set it as a global environment variable.

jamison20000e:

Quote:

In which case, perhaps: %c America, New York

Where does that "%c America, New York" go? Looks like part of a format parameter to some command, but I don't see the context.

jamison20000e · 07-10-2016, 01:02 PM

I thought maybe you were setting a GUI's clock? I should have included it in the above post as an edit.

chris.willing · 07-10-2016, 04:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfoley

That may end up being the best I can do on Linux. In fact I was literally looking for "America/New_York"

That's why I later added

Code:

ls -l /etc/localtime-copied-from | cut -d '/' -f 7-8

. That should give you exactly "America/New_York" (or whatever).

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfoley

I guess I can always set it as a global environment variable.

Some distros set the TZ environment variable - perhaps set that in /etc/profile?

chris

mfoley · 07-10-2016, 05:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chris.willing

Some distros set the TZ environment variable - perhaps set that in /etc/profile?

Not Slackware, and putting it in /etc/profile does no good for cron jobs. That's for a login shell only.

This works (from the web)

Code:

$ printf "2\n49\n1\n1\n" | tzselect 2>&1 | tail -1
America/New_York

However, you still have to know the menu navigation (2, 49, 1, 1) to get the right value. That is no better than simply knowing the timezone string you want and setting that directly in the script. Which is what I'm currently doing with

TZ=America/New_York

bassmadrigal · 07-10-2016, 06:24 PM

I just cleared up some confusion that I had because of this post. This might also help others.

By default, Slackware's timeconfig utility (which is run during the setup process) lists the US timezones first. If you never scrolled down to the "America" section, you might've just selected Eastern (which is the same timezone as America/New_York), so the command provided by chris.willing would output:

Code:

jbhansen@craven-moorhead:~$ ls -l /etc/localtime-copied-from | cut -d '/' -f 7-8
US/Eastern

However, if you scroll further down the timeconfig timezone section to the America section, you could then select America/New_York, which would make his command work as intended.

So, mfoley, if you've been getting US/Eastern when you were wanting America/New_York, use the timeconfig script to change your system to the one you desire.

If you were already aware of this and were wanting something different, sorry for the noise.

chris.willing · 07-10-2016, 07:25 PM

What I was suggesting was to insert something like

Code:

export TZ=$(ls -l /etc/localtime-copied-from | cut -d '/' -f 7-8)

into /etc/profile - or into any script run by cron (previous mention of which which I had missed).

Of course it will only set TZ to the value already set up with timeconfig, as bassmadrigal has pointed out.

chris

kjhambrick · 07-11-2016, 05:26 AM

chris.willing is on to something useful ... here is another way to do what he did.

You could make a script say, getzone in your PATH and chmod 755 /path/to/getzone

Code:

#!/bin/sh
#
# getzone ... expands your TZ to the long name symlinked from /etc/localtime-copied-from into /usr/share/zoneinfo/
#
tmpTZ=""

[ -L /etc/localtime-copied-from ] && tmpTZ="$(readlink /etc/localtime-copied-from |sed -e 's|/usr/share/zoneinfo/||')"

if [ "$tmpTZ" != "" ]
then
   echo "$tmpTZ"
   exit 0
else
   date '+%Z'
   exit 1
fi

Test it ...

Code:

$ date
Mon Jul 11 05:23:41 CDT 2016

$ getzone
US/Central

$FooVarb="$(getzone)" ; echo $FooVarb
US/Central

HTH ...

-- kjh

kjhambrick · 07-11-2016, 06:02 AM

oops ... just saw the ical post ...

Does the tz_convert command do what you need ?

-- kjh