Setting the time using Terminal

Written on: 06 March 2007 Updated on: 20 March 2018

This is really basic stuff but if you aren’t running a GUI then it isn’t as easy as opening up a Time & Date Settings control panel so this is the way to do it.

Page Migration

This page first appeared on the original Debian Wiki which was created over a decade ago.

• Originally Published: 6 March 2007

Setting the timezone

You first want to check what the current date and time is on your machine. Do this by running the following in a Linux shell:

$ date

This should return something like this:

Tue Mar  6 20:47:59 SAST 2007

You can also check the timezone you’re currently using by running:

$ cat /etc/timezone

Which would return something like this:

Africa/Johannesburg

Now if none of this is correct you want to setup your timezone by running this command:

$ tzconfig

On Debian Lenny (5.0) you need to run this command:

$ dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Select your continent and type in your city and hit enter. This should return the following:

Your default time zone is set to 'Africa/Johannesburg'.
Local time is now:      Tue Mar  6 20:50:15 SAST 2007.
Universal Time is now:  Tue Mar  6 18:50:15 UTC 2007.

Synchronise your clock with a NTP server

NTP, the Network Time Protocol, is used to keep computer clocks accurate over the Internet. ntpdate is a simple NTP client which allows a system’s clock to be set to match the time obtained by communicating with one or more servers.

Install the ntp client

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install ntpdate

ntpdate will automatically run when booting your system.