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terdon ♦
terdon ♦
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Say I am logged into a remote system, how can I know what itsit's running? On most modern Linuxes (Linuces?), you have the lsb_release command:

$ lsb_release -ic    
Distributor ID: LinuxMint
Codename:       debian

Which as far as I can tell just gives the same info as /etc/lsb-release. What if that file is not present? I seem to recall that the lsb_release command is relatively new so what if I have to get the OS of an older system?

In any case, lsb stands for Linux Standard Base so I am assuming it won't work on non-Linux Unices. As far as I know, there is no way of getting this information from uname so how can I get this on systems that do not use lsb_release?

Say I am logged into a remote system, how can I know what its running? On most modern Linuxes (Linuces?), you have the lsb_release command:

$ lsb_release -ic    
Distributor ID: LinuxMint
Codename:       debian

Which as far as I can tell just gives the same info as /etc/lsb-release. What if that file is not present? I seem to recall that the lsb_release command is relatively new so what if I have to get the OS of an older system?

In any case, lsb stands for Linux Standard Base so I am assuming it won't work on non-Linux Unices. As far as I know, there is no way of getting this information from uname so how can I get this on systems that do not use lsb_release?

Say I am logged into a remote system, how can I know what it's running? On most modern Linuxes (Linuces?), you have the lsb_release command:

$ lsb_release -ic    
Distributor ID: LinuxMint
Codename:       debian

Which as far as I can tell just gives the same info as /etc/lsb-release. What if that file is not present? I seem to recall that the lsb_release command is relatively new so what if I have to get the OS of an older system?

In any case, lsb stands for Linux Standard Base so I am assuming it won't work on non-Linux Unices. As far as I know, there is no way of getting this information from uname so how can I get this on systems that do not use lsb_release?

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terdon ♦
terdon ♦
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How can I reliably get the operating systemsystem's name?

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terdon ♦
terdon ♦
  • 252.7k
  • 69
  • 481
  • 719

How can I reliably get the operating system name?

Say I am logged into a remote system, how can I know what its running? On most modern Linuxes (Linuces?), you have the lsb_release command:

$ lsb_release -ic    
Distributor ID: LinuxMint
Codename:       debian

Which as far as I can tell just gives the same info as /etc/lsb-release. What if that file is not present? I seem to recall that the lsb_release command is relatively new so what if I have to get the OS of an older system?

In any case, lsb stands for Linux Standard Base so I am assuming it won't work on non-Linux Unices. As far as I know, there is no way of getting this information from uname so how can I get this on systems that do not use lsb_release?