http://www.linux-tips-and-tricks.de

I just faced an issue I thought should be easy to solve. I wanted to know which Linux distribution a bash script runs on. There exists a proposal of the FSB (Free Standards Group) to implement lsb_release which delivers all the info.Unfortunately it's not implemented by all Linux distributions so I installed various distributions on VMWare to get a clue how to write code to extract the Linux distribution. Finally I wrote a bash script and python script to extract the Linux distribution.

 

lsb_release would be the easiest way to find out the Linux distribution. According FSG there can exist two files on a Linux distribution:

2) /etc/distribution-release

 

Unfortunately lsb_release is not available on all distributions and the files in /etc are not following the rules. It seems all naming variations of the config file can be found with 

ls /etc/*[-_]{release,version} 

Finally I was able to write following bash script and this python script . It either uses lsb_release to find out the distro or extracts the distro name from the existing /etc/*[-_]{release,version} file by using the string starting after /etc/ and ending with - or _. Example: /etc/fedora-release exists => distro is fedora

 

The script was tested on a lot of distributions but will also work on most other distributions. Pls let me know if you run it successfully on another Linux distro and I update the following list of tested distros:

 

# opensuse             openSuSE 11.0 (no lsb_release) and 11.2 (lsb_release)
# fedora                    Fedora 12
# centos                   CentOS 5.4
# kubuntu                 Kubuntu 9.10
# debian                   Debian 5.0.3
# arch                        Arch
# slackware             Slackware 13.0.0.0.0
# mandriva               Mandriva 2009.1

# debian                   Knoppix 6.2

# linuxmint               Mint 8

 

For the most recent list of tested distributions see header comment in source code.

 

References:

Linux Standard Base (LSB) - The Linux Foundation: LSB Linux Community

Welche Distribution besitze ich (Which distribution do I have) : List of files in /etc/ directory used by various Linux distributions

lsb_release man page :  Man page of the Free Standards Group

/etc/release equivalents for sundry Linux (and other Unix) distributions : List of files in /etc/ directory used by various Linux distributions

 

 

Other implementations: