Please send corrections to this web page to the time zone mailing list.
tz
database
The public-domain time zone database contains code and data
that represent the history of local time
for many representative locations around the globe.
It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies
to UTC offsets and daylight-saving rules.
This database (often called tz
or zoneinfo
)
is used by several implementations,
including
GNU/Linux,
FreeBSD,
NetBSD,
OpenBSD,
DJGPP,
HP-UX,
IRIX,
SCO OpenServer,
Solaris,
Tru64, and
UnixWare.
In the tz
database's
FTP distribution,
the code is in the file tzcodeC.tar.gz
,
where C
is the code's version;
similarly, the data are in tzdataD.tar.gz
,
where D
is the data's version.
The following shell commands use GNU wget to download
these files to a GNU/Linux or similar host; see the downloaded
README
file for what to do next.
mkdir tz
cd tz
wget 'ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tz*.tar.gz'
gzip -dc tzcode*.tar.gz | tar -xf -
gzip -dc tzdata*.tar.gz | tar -xf -
The code lets you compile the tz
source files into
machine-readable binary files, one for each location. It also lets
you read a tz
binary file and interpret time stamps for that
location.
The data are by no means authoritative. If you find errors, please send changes to the time zone mailing list. You can also subscribe to the mailing list, or retrieve the archive of old messages (in gzip compressed format).
The Web has several other sources for time zone and daylight saving time data. Here are some recent links that may be of interest.
tz
databasetz
's.tz
compilerstz
source into VTIMEZONE text as specified by
the iCalendar
specification published by the IETF
Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group. Vzic is freely
available under the GNU
General Public License (GPL).tz
data include one sketched out by Tim Berners-Lee and
another
used by the iPlanet
Calendar Server.tz
binary file readerstz
binary file reader.
This library is freely available under the
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL),
and is widely used in GNU/Linux systems.tz
binary file reader written in Java.
It is freely available under the GNU LGPL.tz
-based time zone conversion softwareusno*
files in the tz
distribution.