Red Hat distros
If you're using a distribution such as Red Hat then your approach of copying the file would be mostly acceptable.
$ ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/
Africa/ CET Etc/ Hongkong Kwajalein Pacific/ ROK zone.tab
America/ Chile/ Europe/ HST Libya Poland Singapore Zulu
Antarctica/ CST6CDT GB Iceland MET Portugal Turkey
Arctic/ Cuba GB-Eire Indian/ Mexico/ posix/ UCT
Asia/ EET GMT Iran MST posixrules Universal
Atlantic/ Egypt GMT0 iso3166.tab MST7MDT PRC US/
Australia/ Eire GMT-0 Israel Navajo PST8PDT UTC
Brazil/ EST GMT+0 Jamaica NZ right/ WET
Canada/ EST5EDT Greenwich Japan NZ-CHAT ROC W-SU
I would recommend linking to it rather than copying however.
$ sudo unlink /etc/localtime
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT+6 /etc/localtime
Now date shows the different timezone:
$ date -u
Thu Jan 23 05:40:31 UTC 2017
$ date
Wed Jan 22 23:40:38 GMT+6 2017
Ubuntu/Debian Distros
To change the timezone on either of these distros you can use this command:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Current default time zone: 'Etc/GMT-6'
Local time is now: Thu Jan 23 11:52:16 GMT-6 2017.
Universal Time is now: Thu Jan 23 05:52:16 UTC 2017.
Now when we check it out:
$ date -u
Thu Jan 23 05:53:32 UTC 2017
$ date
Thu Jan 23 11:53:33 GMT-6 2017
NOTE: There's also this option in Ubuntu 14.04 and higher with a single command (source: Ask Ubuntu -
setting timezone from terminal):
$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Etc/GMT-6
