[Linux-disciples] Identifying the distro

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 03:33:07PM -0400, Adam Rosi-Kessel wrote:
> Not that I know. You can probably find an idiosyncrasy for each
> distribution--e.g., Debian has /etc/debian_version (or /usr/bin/dpkg), etc..

Looks like the LSB is my friend:
http://www.linuxbase.org/

My Ubuntu laptop is LSB-compliant, but BCN appears not to
be. (Install 'lsb' if you're interested.) LSB-compliant
distros have a file /etc/lsb-release that looks like so:

	DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
	DISTRIB_RELEASE=5.10
	DISTRIB_CODENAME=breezy
	DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu (The Breezy Badger Release)"

which is nice. However, obvious FreeBSD doesn't support the
LSB. So this will buy me some information about Linux
distributions, but I can't rely on their supporting the LSB.
Testing for the existence of /etc/lsb-release is easy
enough, though.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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