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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T16:29:40+00:00

I’m writing a program that needs to be able to read in the time

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I’m writing a program that needs to be able to read in the time zone files on Linux. And that means that I need to be able to consistently find them across distros. As far as I know, they are always located in /usr/share/zoneinfo. The question is, are they in fact always located in /usr/share/zoneinfo? Or are there distros which put them elsewhere? And if so, where do they put them?

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  1. Editorial Team

    A quote from tzset(3):

    The system timezone directory used depends on the (g)libc version.
    Libc4 and libc5 use /usr/lib/zoneinfo,
    and, since libc-5.4.6,
    when this doesn’t work, will try /usr/share/zoneinfo.
    Glibc2 will use the environment
    variable TZDIR, when that exists. Its
    default depends on how it was installed, but normally is
    /usr/share/zoneinfo.

    Note, however, that nothing prevents some perverse distro from patching libc and placing the files wherever they want.

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