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
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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)
4
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.
David Pashley
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