How do I know which distro I am running on?

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 09:57:49AM -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Susan Macchia wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone know how I can find out which distro I am running on?  I can use
>> uname to find the kernel and basic OS (i686-Linux vs. ia64-Linux, for example),
>> but I need to know more than that because the same combinations can be found on
>> a variety of distros.
>
>Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, from a security standpoint) there
>is no standard for determining this.  Some distros embed this information
>in /etc/issue.  Redhat also tends to include a /etc/redhat-release file.

Many people change /etc/{.issue,issue} specifically to prevent people from
using it to determine what type of system it is.

This is one of the fun issues when attempting to do portable packaging, and
is a major part of what the ``libtool'' package is all about.

Bill
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