The onion tool

Claude Robitaille

Are the changes made using the command line tool onion persistent? The help is silent about this.

crispyoz

@Claude-Robitaille I have no idea what the script does as I stopped using it ages ago. I prefer to use uci :

uci set system.@system[0].timezone='AEST-10AEDT,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3'
uci commit system

This sets the timezone of GMT+10 (Sydney AEST)

Claude Robitaille

To answer my question: yes, it is persistent. But since it is not clearly stipulated (at least in the help) this should not be rely upon....like anything unspecified!!

crispyoz

@Claude-Robitaille hence my point. uci is clearly documented and proven. I don't like the sand moving under my feet.

Lazar Demin

The onion script is meant to provide a user-friendly wrapper around uci for setting the timezone. The changes are persistent.

The script is open source and can be found on GitHub if you're curious: https://github.com/OnionIoT/Onion-Scripts/blob/master/onion.sh

crispyoz

@Lazar-Demin Or you could just understand uci. I like the idea of the "onion" script but I expect most newbies don't realise it is just a script. Once you understand the nomenclature of uci it's pretty stright forward anyway.

Lazar Demin

@crispyoz Agreed, uci is straight forward and very powerful.
The timezone strings are a different story - very complex and not useful to learn.

I see what you're saying though, maybe in the next version we'll add a blurb in the onion script help output that the source is available on github.

György Farkas

@Claude-Robitaille Yes, the time(zone) settings - made by the onion script - are persistent.
But the changes are not able to survive a Factory Reset, a firstboot or a sysupgrade -n <image file> command of course.

György Farkas

@crispyoz said in The onion tool:

I prefer to use uci :
uci set system.@system[0].timezone='AEST-10AEDT,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3'
uci commit system

This sets the timezone of GMT+10 (Sydney AEST)

Almost.
One more command
eg. an echo 'AEST-10AEDT,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3' > /etc/TZ
is missing otherwise you have to reboot your device.

See also: cat /usr/bin/onion Timezone Functions

György Farkas

@Lazar-Demin Usually we know our ("time zone") location - so the command can be a little bit simpler:
onion time set $(onion time list | grep my_location)

The echo "$tz" > /tmp/TZ line in the /usr/bin/onion script is a redundancy.

I think the Time Zones table (the list of available timezones) should be in a separate file.

crispyoz

@György-Farkas Yes you are correct but I run ntpclient so I don't need restart