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
6 Answers
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.
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1on centOS 5.3 that file doesn't exist, but the bin directory provides provides lsb_release as a command alternative– ZakOct 5, 2009 at 23:21
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From the Wikipedia Linux Standard Base page: "The command lsb_release -a is available in many systems to get the LSB version details, or can be made available by installing an appropriate package, for example the redhat-lsb package on Red-Hat-flavored Linux distributions such as Fedora.[2]" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base Sep 14, 2015 at 1:25
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1lsb-release does not exist on fedora systems. The correct file is called system-release Sep 6, 2017 at 9:10
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sudo dnf install lsb_release added the command. it wasn't needed as cat /etc/fedora-release gave the essential information: $ cat /etc/fedora-release Fedora release 39 (Thirty Nine) Feb 7 at 19:37
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)
Ahh answer to my own question..
cat /etc/issue
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1this won't be a reliable way of checking for the server version because any sysadmin can modify the contents of that file. I modify the /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net files to display the company name and legal notice (and explicitly remove the distro name & version info)(– Roy RicoOct 5, 2009 at 23:12