Dean Wilson@UnixDaemon: ... It's not even close to relevant.

Wed, 29 Sep 2004

/etc/release -- Consistency, never heard of it!
If you are working on a modern Unix machine (no, thats not an oxymoron) then it's annoying difficult to determine the operating system name and version running. Where you should just be able to type '/etc/release' and get the relevant details you instead need to either guess or brute-force your way through the possibilities. Debian stores this info in '/etc/debian_version', Redhat in '/etc/redhat_release'. You know the world is going to end when Solaris makes the most sense and puts this information in '/etc/release'. Why is this better? Because it doesn't assume my scripts know where they are running, they can determine that from the contents of the file itself!

A warning to one and all, this is going to become my new crusade ;)

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Posted: 2004/09/29 19:30 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date

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