INIT(5) File Formats and Configurations INIT(5)

NAME

init, TIMEZONE - set default system time zone and locale

SYNOPSIS

/etc/default/init

/etc/TIMEZONE

DESCRIPTION

This file sets the time zone environment variable TZ, and the locale-
related environment variables LANG, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES,
LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC and LC_TIME.

It can also be used to set any additional environment variables which
should be present in all processes started by init(8) or svc.startd(8),
and in any zoneadmd(8) daemons started automatically to support zone
operations.

The format of the file is a set of tokens of the form:

VAR=value

where VAR is an environment variable and value is the value assigned to
the variable. value can be enclosed in double quotes (") or single
quotes ('), however, these quotes cannot be part of the value. Neither
VAR nor value may contain whitespace. Multiple VAR=value pairs can
occur on the same line, separated by whitespace or a semicolon (;),
but, for compatibility with existing software, the TZ variable must
appear on its own line with no leading whitespace. Comments are
supported; each comment must be on its own line and begin with a hash
(#) character.

If the CMASK variable is specified, it is not passed to the environment
but the value is used to set the initial umask that init(8) uses and
that every other process inherits. The CMASK value is specified in
octal and must be between 000 and 077 to be accepted; the value is
silently ignored otherwise. If the value is missing or cannot be
parsed as an octal number, then a value of 0 is assumed. A sequence of
valid octal digits followed by other trailing characters will be
treated as if the trailing characters were not present.

For init(8), the number of environment variables that can be set is
limited to 20.

/etc/TIMEZONE is a symbolic link to /etc/default/init. This link
exists for compatibility with legacy software, is obsolete, and may be
removed in a future release.

SEE ALSO

ctime(3C), environ(7), init(8), rtc(8), svc.startd(8), zoneadmd(8)

NOTES

When changing the TZ setting on x86 systems, you must make a
corresponding change to the /etc/rtc_config file to account for the new
timezone setting. This can be accomplished by executing the following
commands, followed by a reboot, to make the changes take effect:

# rtc -z zone-name
# rtc -c

where zone-name is the same name as the TZ variable setting.

See rtc(8) for more information.

illumos November 7, 2021 illumos