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.