The Asia/Almaty tzfile generated from recent Github tzdata snapshot contains the following TZ string at the end of the file $ git describe 2016f-7-ge0a7616 $ strings etc/zoneinfo/Asia/Almaty | tail -1 <+06>-6 This format is not documented in newtzset.3: When TZ is used directly as a specification of the time conversion information, it must have the following syntax (spaces inserted for clarity): stdoffset[dst[offset][,rule]] Where: std and dst Three or more bytes that are the designation for the standard (std) or summer (dst) time zone. Only std is required; if dst is missing, then summer time does not apply in this locale. Upper- and lowercase letters are explicitly allowed. Any characters except a leading colon (:), digits, comma (,), ASCII minus (-), ASCII plus (+), and NUL bytes are allowed.