How can a Windows program temporarily change its time zone?

Question

I've written a function to return the time_t value corresponding to midnight on a given day. When there is no midnight for a given day, it returns the earliest time available; that situation can occur, for example, when Egypt enters daylight-saving time. This year, the time change takes effect at midnight on the night of April 29, so the clock goes directly from 23:59 to 01:00.

Now I'm writing unit tests for this function, and one of the tests should replicate the Egypt scenario. In Unix, I can accomplish it like this:

putenv("TZ", "Egypt", true);
tzset();

After doing that, further calls to localtime behave as if they're in Egypt instead of Minnesota, and my tests pass. Merely setting the environment variable doesn't have any effect on Windows, though. What can I do to make the unit test think it's somewhere else without affecting the rest of the programs running on the system?

Answer 1

Have you seen the SetTimeZoneInformation Win32 API function?

Answer 2

I used setlocale(LC_ALL, "deu_aut") to switch the language/country settings to Austria - declared in locale.h. Sadly i haven't found a language/country string for egypt, but perhaps this gives you a hint.

Answer 3

I have exactly the same requirement:

->some processes must be stuck to UTC and others to some timezone different from the Windows system timezone

After months of (interrupted) study I fall to the conclusion that on Windows it is only possible to set "UTC" or "current" system time zone. So only the following may be done:

     - set TZ="UTC" 
     - unset TZ

Answer 4

Use Isolation/Mocking framework - the only one I know of at the moment is Isolator++ which is currently in beta, I'm sure that you can get a copy by asking for one from the good people of Typemock.