How do i find out which Fedora version I'm running from the cli (not uname -a)?

Question

I want to know if the box is Fedora Core 4 or Redhat 9, or CentOS, etc... not if it has Kernel 2.6.x

Answer 1

On modern systems you should be able to look in /etc/lsb-release

mojo-jojo david% cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=karmic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu karmic (development branch)"

This should be the LSB mandated way of finding out the distribution across different Linux distributions.

You should not rely on /etc/issue, as it is used for the login message, and someone might change it.

Answer 2

Please see:

• http://serverfault.com/questions/3331/how-do-i-find-out-what-version-of-linux-is-running
• http://serverfault.com/questions/57616/how-do-i-find-out-the-distro-of-a-server
• http://serverfault.com/questions/55834/determining-type-of-linux-machine

Answer 3

This perhaps?

[dummyuser@d400 ~]$ ls -l /etc/system-release
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 14 2009-06-04 19:05 /etc/system-release -> fedora-release

[dummuser@d400 ~]$ cat /etc/system-release
Fedora release 11 (Leonidas)

Answer 4

Ahh answer to my own question..

cat /etc/issue

Answer 5

ahh, even better, and *nixwide:

lsb_release -d