Linux distro from bash script


 
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# 1  
Old 01-18-2008
Linux distro from bash script

hello ALL,

I wander, is there an easy way to get information which linux distro and its version a script runs on?

I'm looking for a function like getDistroInfo(), which would return strings like "Ubuntu7.10" or "SLES10" or "RHEL5" etc.
uname returns lots of stuff, but distro info.
/etc/issue has different formats depending on distro (which is not really convenient if you don't know the distro). Does anybody have an idea?


Thanx!
Alex
# 2  
Old 08-19-2008
Alex, what you really want to look at is the file /etc/*-release. It has several lines describing the current Linux distro that your running (see release-files for the various distro's version of this file)

The file contains several lines containing various parts of the Name - in my case I run Ubuntu and my file is named /etc/lsb-release and contains the following 4 lines -

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.04.1"

the DISTRIB info should be pretty consistent across the many variants
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