Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Changing timezone in irssi at runtime

About a year ago, I moved my irssi-in-a-screen into a separate zone on my server. I installed the new zone, installed screen and irssi inside it. And started it all up. After a little while, I realized that the zone was set to UTC. (By default, OmniOS zones start with their timezone set to UTC.) That’s easy enough to change by editing /etc/default/init and restarting anything that has the timezone cached in the environment. Which includes irssi. In general, I don’t like restarting irssi because it is a bit of a pain to rejoin the channels I want to be in temporarily.

Well, it turns out that there is a way to change irssi’s timezone setting at runtime!

/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='US/Eastern'

I definitely did not expect something like this to work, but it does. (Yes, yes, I know this is on the irssi tips and tricks page.)

2 Comments »

  1. Hey, thanks for this, ran into the issue on my new omnios server.

    PS, I tested you for your amateur extra license. (well, all three in one go) back on 2020-07-09. (assuming you're the same Jeff Sipek.

    Comment by michael masterson — October 21, 2024 @ 19:05

  2. Glad you found it useful!

    Yes, that was me ... err, I mean... RR 73, de AC1JR :)

    Comment by JeffPC — January 9, 2025 @ 01:56

Atom feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Powered by blahgd