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

Solution 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.

Solution 2

Even better, and *nixwide:

lsb_release -d

Solution 3

Please see:

• How do I find out what version of Linux is running?
• How do I find out the distro of a server?
• Determining type of Linux machine

Solution 4

I had to do

cat /etc/fedora-release

View more solutions

Comments

[Roy Rico]

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)(

[Zak]

on centOS 5.3 that file doesn't exist, but the bin directory provides provides lsb_release as a command alternative

[ACyclic]

lsb_release is not available on Fedora (21 Workstation) base image

[Jeremy Hajek]

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

[Federico Galli]

lsb-release does not exist on fedora systems. The correct file is called system-release