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

score 17 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 05 '09 at 23:40

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)

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

4

Please see:

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

Community

1

answered Oct 05 '09 at 23:05

Zoredache

128,755
40
271
413

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '09 at 23:09

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.

answered Oct 05 '09 at 23:09

David Pashley

23,151
2
41
71

1

on centOS 5.3 that file doesn't exist, but the bin directory provides provides lsb_release as a command alternative – Zak Oct 05 '09 at 23:21
lsb_release is not available on Fedora (21 Workstation) base image – ACyclic Mar 25 '15 at 16:58
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]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base – Jeremy Hajek Sep 14 '15 at 01:25
1

lsb-release does not exist on fedora systems. The correct file is called system-release – Federico Galli Sep 06 '17 at 09:10

score 4 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 13 '16 at 00:44

4

Even better, and *nixwide:

lsb_release -d

edited Dec 13 '16 at 00:44

ROMANIA_engineer

107
5

answered Oct 05 '09 at 23:20

Zak

1,032
2
15
25

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 28 '16 at 19:39

2

I had to do

cat /etc/fedora-release

answered Feb 28 '16 at 19:39

creftos

121
3

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 05 '09 at 22:58

0

Ahh answer to my own question..

cat /etc/issue

answered Oct 05 '09 at 22:58

Zak

1,032
2
15
25

1

this 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 Rico Oct 05 '09 at 23:12

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

6 Answers6