Setting UTC as the Time Zone in Mac OS 10

Question

Setting UTC as the Time Zone in Mac OS 10

I may be missing something obvious but how do I set the system time zone to UTC (that is to say I would like to see the creation times on my files to be expressed in UTC)?

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Mar 29, 2011 11:16 AM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 29, 2011 11:41 AM in response to RagedLobster63

You would need to set your time zone in Date & Time preferences to Greenwich time (GMT) which is the same as UTC. However, this will affect all dates and times on the computer, not just file creation information.

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Answer 2

Mar 29, 2011 11:58 AM in response to Kappy

The problem I have is that when I go into the data and time settings and select timezone, the only field that I have is to select the closest city. I could select London, England however England uses daylight savings time and as a result uses GMT (UTC+0) during the winter and British Summer Time (UTC+1) during the summer. (aka selecting London as the city to base my timezone does not provide UTC year round, only in the winter).

I could select a different city in the GMT timezone that does not use daylight savings time such as Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and my system will display the time that is the same as UTC time. However, if the government of Burkina Faso ever arbitrarily decided that it would like to implement daylight savings time and Apple updated its timezone settings for Burkina Faso as a result, my system would adjust to this newly implemented daylight savings time and no longer display UTC.

(Recall that UTC is never adjusted for daylight savings time.)

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 29, 2011 2:17 PM in response to RagedLobster63

I never said it would be easy.

I don't think there is a solutions such as you prefer. You could search CNet Downloads or MacUpdate for UTC clocks, but I don't think any of them will likely tie in to file creation dates.

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Answer 4

Mar 30, 2011 11:14 AM in response to Kappy

I refuse to believe that Mac OS does not support UTC as a timezone as UTC is the global time standard across all computer systems. I'm just having trouble finding it as it seems as though it is not easy.

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Answer 5

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 30, 2011 12:09 PM in response to RagedLobster63

I found this hint but I don't know that it works. Open the Terminal and paste this:

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

Press RETURN and enter your admin password when prompted. It is not echoed.

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Answer 6

Mar 30, 2011 12:31 PM in response to Kappy

Did this link but no new options that looked like UTC were added to the list of nearby cities in the timezone tab of the date and time settings.

Thanks for trying to help.

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Answer 7

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Mar 30, 2011 12:56 PM in response to RagedLobster63

Hi,

There are more time zone options available than are displayed in System Preferences, and there actually IS a timezone called UTC available in MacOS. You can see the zone choices this way:

Finder>Go Menu>Go to Folder
enter
/usr/share/zoneinfo and click Go

The Terminal command that Kappy suggested resets the time directly, without altering the lists in System Preferences. It's mentioned in [this outside thread|http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?p=609138]. Again, the command is

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

I tried it while booted from a test clone, and it seemed to work. The map display in System Preferences changed incorrectly to British Summer Time which would be UTC+1, but the system time in the menu bar was correctly set to UTC.

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Answer 8

Mar 30, 2011 1:11 PM in response to jsd2

My appologies, I previously didn't see the space between the UTC and /etc/ so as a result, when I ran the command nothing happened.

Although I can use the terminal window to set the time to UTC this way, I then run into the problem where by just opening the date and time window, the system timezone is set to London, England where it goes back to UTC +1 in the summer and remains so after closing the date and time window.

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Answer 9

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 30, 2011 1:25 PM in response to RagedLobster63

FWIW, I found that hint by doing a Google search for "set utc time zone in os x." There were quite a number of other links. Perhaps looking at them will provide an ultimate solution for you.

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