How do I find the current system timezone?

Question

On Linux, I need to find the currently configured timezone as an Olson location. I want my (C or C++) code to be portable to as many Linux systems as possible.

For e

Answer 1

Pretty late in the day, but I was looking for something similar and found that ICU library has the provision to get the Olson timezone ID: http://userguide.icu-project.org/datetime/timezone

It is now installed on most linux distributions (install the libicu-dev package or equivalent). Code:

#include 
#include 

using namespace U_ICU_NAMESPACE;

int main() {
  TimeZone* tz = TimeZone::createDefault();
  UnicodeString us;
  tz->getID(us);
  std::string s;
  us.toUTF8String(s);
  std::cout << "Current timezone ID: " << s << '\n';
  delete tz;

  return 0;
}

And to get the abbreviated/POSIX timezone names (should also work on Windows):

#include 

int main() {
  time_t ts = 0;
  struct tm t;
  char buf[16];
  ::localtime_r(&ts, &t);
  ::strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%z", &t);
  std::cout << "Current timezone (POSIX): " << buf << std::endl;
  ::strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%Z", &t);
  std::cout << "Current timezone: " << buf << std::endl;