On a systemd-based distribution, which command sets the system's time zone to Europe/Berlin, updating /etc/localtime accordingly?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 107. Administrative tasks medium
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The options
Not correct date -s Europe/Berlin
Wrong. date -s sets the system CLOCK to a given date and time. It does not understand time-zone names and would reject this argument.
Not correct export TZ=Europe/Berlin
Wrong as a system setting. TZ overrides the time zone for the current shell and the processes it starts, which is genuinely useful for a one-off, but it changes nothing system-wide and does not survive logout.
Not correct tzselect Europe/Berlin
Wrong. tzselect is an interactive helper that walks you through continent and city and then PRINTS the resulting TZ value. It deliberately changes no system configuration at all.
Correct timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Berlin
Correct. timedatectl set-timezone replaces /etc/localtime with a symlink to the matching file under /usr/share/zoneinfo, and the change is persistent and system-wide. It also validates the name, so a typo is rejected rather than silently accepted.
Why
Zone definitions are binary files under /usr/share/zoneinfo, laid out as Region/City. The active zone is /etc/localtime, normally a symlink into that tree; Debian-family systems additionally keep the zone name as plain text in /etc/timezone, which `dpkg-reconfigure tzdata` writes. `timedatectl` with no arguments reports the current local time, UTC time, zone and whether NTP synchronisation is active. `timedatectl list-timezones` enumerates the valid names.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- LPI exam objective 107.3
- What it says
- Configure the system time zone using the zoneinfo database.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 107 and space the ones you get wrong.
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