Not able to set time zone on ArchLinux

Question

I would like to set my timezone to Asia/Kolkata. Here is the error I see on using timedatectl:

$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Kolkata
Failed to set time zone: Invalid or not installed time zone 'Asia/Kolkata'

And here is the output from timedatectl status:

               Local time: Tue 2020-11-03 12:33:38 UTC
           Universal time: Tue 2020-11-03 12:33:38 UTC
                 RTC time: Tue 2020-11-03 12:33:38    
                Time zone: n/a (UTC, +0000)           
System clock synchronized: yes                        
              NTP service: active                     
          RTC in local TZ: no

I am using a valid timezone:

$ timedatectl list-timezones | grep Kolkata
Asia/Kolkata

Looks like my zoneinfo file is messed up:

$ cat /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Kolkata
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8

Please help. Thank you.

Please [edit] your question and add the output of timedatectl list-timezones | grep Kolkata. — terdon, Nov 03 '20 at 12:39
@terdon I have added more information. Please help if possible. — babon, Nov 03 '20 at 12:53

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 03 '20 at 14:16

Looks like your /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Kolkata is malformed. I would guess you inadvertently ran a command and redirected the output to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Kolkata. Luckily, the fix is easy, just reinstall the tzdata package:

sudo pacman -S tzdata

And then you will be able to change the timezone normally:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Kolkata

Not able to set time zone on ArchLinux

1 Answers1