[CentOS-devel] /etc/redhat-release

On Jun 10, 2014, at 2:44 PM, Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy at nobugconsulting.ro> wrote:

> 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.
> 
We've been cursing this week that we didn't now about lsb_release. Just the same, our trick was similar to yours:

rpm -qf --queryformat '%{VERSION}\n' /etc/redhat-release

Which gets me the distro version, regardless of what RHEL derivative I'm querying. Yes, you're out of luck on SUSE but luckily that wasn't in my problem set.

Todd