BSD Clock
On BSD, the clock generally uses UTC time with a timezone offset in software, as opposed to local time.
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Date and Time
Use date(1) as the root user to set the current date and time.
# January 1st, 2001 at 12:30 date 0101011230
The CMOS clock is automatically updated to match the system clock.
Timezone
The configured timezone is set in /etc/localtime. By standard convention, this should be a symbolic link to a pre-prepared file, typically under /usr/share/zoneinfo.
To check the current configuration, try:
realpath /etc/localtime
To change the configuration, try:
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime
Consider using the interactive tzsetup(8) utility.
Some utilities will also respect a TZ environment variable.
export TZ=America/New_York date