I'm going to try and get this thread back on track, after all I'm sure there is somewhere else we can discuss if America is a country, continent, ship, band, or something else...

As mentioned in previous posts, you can check:
/etc/redhat-release
/etc/fedora-release
/etc/debian_version
/etc/slackware-version

to get the version for those distros. My question then is, Is it safe to say that /etc/*(-|_)release will have the distro version? (I haven't tested that regex yet so someone will hopefully correct me if I was wrong there).

The next question is, do you really need do know the distro? Isn't is better to test if some module or function exists, or check to see where some file location is? What are you trying to do?

Finally, I'm glad to see I'm not the only person still using RH9.

In reply to Re: (OT) command for finding out which distribution of Linux is being used by xorl
in thread (OT) command for finding out which distribution of Linux is being used by heidi

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.