A function to retrieve the system timezone on Unix systems which has been found to find an answer when 'Sys.timezone()' has failed. It is based on an answer by Duane McCully posted on 'StackOverflow', and adapted to be callable from R. The package also builds on Windows, but just returns NULL. The functionality it offers was not available in R when the package was written, but has since been added which reduces the need for this package.