[ale] Universal way to determine distro?

[Cliff Free]

A most excellent bit of shell scripting... surprisingly, Fedora Core 5
has to fall through to the nasty else for non-LSB compliant
distros.... but it does still work ;-)

On 7/20/06, lists at stromberg.org <lists at stromberg.org> wrote:
> > Good morning,
> >
> >    I guess this shows my lack of knowledge but is there a
> > universal way to determine what distro a particular machine
> > is running? I'd like to do this from bash or python, but I
> > can't think of nor google anything useful. Any ideas?
>
> Here is one place where the LSB really made a difference. Check out the
> lsb_release utility. This is from my ~/.zprofile that displays the distro
> I've logged into. The really nasty "else" case is for truly ancient Linux
> versions that have no LSB compliance:
>
>
> if [ -f /etc/lsb-release ]; then
>     DISTRO=`lsb_release -i | cut -d: -f2 | sed s/'^\t'//`
>     DISTRO_REVISION=`lsb_release -r | cut -d: -f2 | sed s/'^\t//'`
> else
>     DISTRO=`ls -d /etc/[A-Za-z]*[_-][rv]e[lr]* | grep -v "lsb-release.d" | \
>             xargs cat | grep -v "=" | head -n 1 | cut -d\( -f1 | \
>             sed s/"Base System version "// | sed s/" release"//`
> fi
>
>
>
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