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An Acronym for Universale Temps Coordinee, ie Coordinated Universal Time.

This is the standard time zone all other time zones are based on. It replaced GMT in the early 1970s. UTC is measured with atomic clocks. It is kept within 0.9 seconds of TAI, but with an integral number of leap seconds added occasionally to reflect the season at and location on the planet. This way UTC stays in sync with the rotation of the earth, making sure midnight always occurs at the same time relative to the stars.

To date all corrections have been positive to account for the tidal drag on the earth which slows the planet down.

For more information see http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/systime.html

Compare GMT, TAI.


Unix systems and cousins traditionally store times as UTC, and convert them according to the local timezone settings only for display. On a typical Linux machine, /etc/timezone contains the time zone (such as Pacific/Auckland), and /etc/localtime is a SymLink to a binary file containing information on the standard and the daylight savings offset of that time zone, as well instructions on how to calculate when daylight savings is in effect. In the above-mentioned example it might look like this
/etc $ ls -l localtime lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Apr 22 00:19 localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific/Auckland

The SuperUser can use tzselect(1)? to change these settings.

Also, /etc/default/rcS (AddToMe: not on Slackware; which distro?) contains a UTC variable to tell your Kernel whether or not your hardware clock is set to UTC. Doing so and setting UTC=yes is A Good Idea.

For more about setting up your machine's clock, see HowToClock? and NTP.