[CentOS-devel] /etc/redhat-release

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 06/10/2014 10:37 PM, Fred Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 10:28:26PM +0300, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>>     On 06/10/2014 06:28 PM, Daniel Ankers wrote:
>>
>>     On 10 June 2014 16:19, Fred
>>     Smith <[1]fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
>>
>>       Hi all!
>>       I think it was on this list, in the last week or so I saw some
>>       comment
>>       about how some apps may grope the contents of /etc/redhat-release
>>       when
>>       installing themselves, so as to figure how which OS they're running
>>       on,
>>       and there was some mention of this not being the best of all
>>       possible
>>       ideas.
>>
>>     Hi Fred,
>>     I would have thought that "lsb_release -a" would be far more portable
>>     across varying different distributions and versions.
>>     Regards,
>>     Dan
> Dan, this app is installed only on RHEL or Centos systems, so cross-
> distribution issues don't come up (if yu try to run the installer on,
> say, SUSE, it'll just error out with "unknown/incorrect distribution"
> or something similar.)
>
> So the pain comes simply in telling which RHEL or centos it is. While
> I'm sure someone smarter could parse /etc/redhat-release in fewer lines
> of code than I have, it's still a pain and prone to breakage with each
> new version. that's where lsb_release -i -r should make life simpler.
rpm -q should make life much easier if you already know you are on 
centos/RHEL.  just rpm -q --qf  "%{vendor}\n" kernel or glibc or 
filesystem any other mandatory package to discriminate between the two 
families of distributions and then rpm -q --qf "apropriate fields here " 
centos-release / redhat-release  to find out anything else you need.