systemd-timedated.service(8) — Linux manual page

NAME \| SYNOPSIS \| DESCRIPTION \| LIST OF NETWORK TIME SYNCHRONIZATION SERVICES \| SEE ALSO \| COLOPHON

SYSTEMD-T....SERVICE(8) systemd-timedated.service SYSTEMD-T....SERVICE(8)

NAME top

       systemd-timedated.service, systemd-timedated - Time and date bus
       mechanism

SYNOPSIS top

       systemd-timedated.service

       /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-timedated

DESCRIPTION top

       systemd-timedated.service is a system service that may be used as
       a mechanism to change the system clock and timezone, as well as to
       enable/disable network time synchronization.  systemd-timedated is
       automatically activated on request and terminates itself when it
       is unused.

       The tool timedatectl(1) is a command line client to this service.

       systemd-timedated currently offers access to the following four
       settings:

       •   The system time

       •   The system timezone

       •   A boolean controlling whether the system RTC is in local or
           UTC timezone

       •   Whether the time synchronization service is enabled/started or
           disabled/stopped, see next section.

       See org.freedesktop.timedate1(5) and
       org.freedesktop.LogControl1(5) for information about the D-Bus
       API.

LIST OF NETWORK TIME SYNCHRONIZATION SERVICES top

       systemd-timedated will look for files with a ".list" extension in
       ntp-units.d/ directories. Each file is parsed as a list of unit
       names, one per line. Empty lines and lines with comments ("#") are
       ignored. Files are read from /usr/lib/systemd/ntp-units.d/ and the
       corresponding directories under /etc/, /run/, /usr/local/lib/.
       Files in /etc/ override files with the same name in /run/,
       /usr/local/lib/, and /usr/lib/. Files in /run/ override files with
       the same name under /usr/. Packages should install their
       configuration files in /usr/lib/ (distribution packages) or
       /usr/local/lib/ (local installs).

       Example 1. ntp-units.d/ entry for systemd-timesyncd

           # /usr/lib/systemd/ntp-units.d/80-systemd-timesync.list
           systemd-timesyncd.service

       If the environment variable $SYSTEMD_TIMEDATED_NTP_SERVICES is
       set, systemd-timedated will parse the contents of that variable as
       a colon-separated list of unit names. When set, this variable
       overrides the file-based list described above.

       Example 2. An override that specifies that chronyd should be used
       if available

           SYSTEMD_TIMEDATED_NTP_SERVICES=chronyd.service:systemd-timesyncd.service

COLOPHON top

       This page is part of the systemd (systemd system and service
       manager) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#bugreports⟩.
       This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/systemd/systemd.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2025-08-11.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
       a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

systemd 258~rc2                                   SYSTEMD-T....SERVICE(8)

Pages that refer to this page: timedatectl(1), localtime(5), org.freedesktop.timedate1(5), systemd.directives(7), systemd.index(7)

systemd-timedated.service(8) — Linux manual page

NAME top

SYNOPSIS top

DESCRIPTION top

LIST OF NETWORK TIME SYNCHRONIZATION SERVICES top

SEE ALSO top

COLOPHON top