A systemd host was installed with the wrong region and reports timestamps in UTC. Every user on it should see local time for Europe/Lisbon from now on. Which command makes that the system-wide setting?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 108. Essential system services medium
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The options
Correct timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Lisbon
Correct. set-timezone takes a zone name from the tz database and repoints /etc/localtime at the matching file under /usr/share/zoneinfo, which is what the C library reads when formatting local time.
Not correct timedatectl set-time Europe/Lisbon
Wrong. set-time expects a date and time string such as "2026-08-18 09:30:00". Handing it a zone name is a syntax error, and even if accepted it would move the clock rather than change the zone.
Not correct timedatectl set-local-rtc 1
Wrong. That tells the system to keep the hardware clock in local time instead of UTC, a compatibility setting for dual-boot machines. It does not change which zone the system considers local.
Not correct export TZ=Europe/Lisbon
Wrong for a system-wide change. The TZ environment variable overrides the zone for the current shell and the processes it starts, and it disappears with that shell. It is useful for one-off conversions, not for configuring the host.
Why
The system zone is expressed by /etc/localtime, normally a symlink into /usr/share/zoneinfo; Debian-derived systems additionally keep the zone name as plain text in /etc/timezone. `timedatectl list-timezones` prints the valid names, which are Area/Location pairs and are case-sensitive. A per-process override with TZ always wins over /etc/localtime for that process.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page timedatectl(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 108 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
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