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for compatibility with legacy software, is obsolete, and may be removed in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