funky code

Where am I?

Recently I have been working for several clients where I had to test programs on different servers. The Unix prompt alone doesn’t always tell you which operating system you are logged on and – it gets worse – there seems to be no convention at all on where to store that information. Arun Singh from Novell has written a nice script to determine a Linux distro. However that script does not help you with other Unices and it isn’t installed on any server anyway. So as a note to myself here is a little collection of commands that help to find out the OS your shell is running on. A few further ideas are listed in this German linux forum.

cat /etc/issue*;
cat /etc/*-release;
cat /etc/*version;
lsb-release -a;
cat /proc/version;