Linux- Windows Timezone Mapping?

Question

All the Timezone in Windows are displayed in such a way like

(GMT+10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney,

GMT and Offset and the place. In turn ,

Answer 1

The definitions in the Etc directory are meant to be POSIX style, thus they have their sign reversed from what you would expect. I'm not an expert for POSIX, but as far as I get it, the basic idea was to express timzones by the combination of their local name and the offset to GMT. An example for middle europe (Central European Time / CET):

Europe/Berlin (w/o daylight savings)  equals  GMT+01:00  equals  CET-1

GMT-1 in the Etc directory in fact describes a (fictous) timezone called "GMT" which is one hour ahead of (the real) GMT.

As far as I know, these files are only there to allow you to create (symbolic) links against them, so if you were situated somwhere in middle europe, you would create a link to GMT-1 and call it CET-1.

The best recommendation I can give you is to entirely ignore the Etc directory and use some mapping table from windows timezone names to unix timezone folders/files. Windows timezone info does not only give the offset to GMT, but also knows about Daylight Savings (and when in begins or ends). The same is true for the folders/files in the timezone database, but not for the files in the Etc directory - they give a simple static offset to GMT.

A list of time zones in the tz database can be found in the wikipedia.