Find OS Information
Apr 2023
There are many ways to extract this information from Linux, here are just a few examples:
This one is my favorite, although if you are having issues, this doesn't give you some vital information like kernel version:
From the command line, use:
cat /etc/os-release
You will get an output similar to below:
NAME="AlmaLinux" VERSION="8.5 (Arctic Sphynx)" ID="almalinux" ID_LIKE="rhel centos fedora" VERSION_ID="8.5" PLATFORM_ID="platform:el8" PRETTY_NAME="AlmaLinux 8.5 (Arctic Sphynx)" ANSI_COLOR="0;34" CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:almalinux:almalinux:8::baseos" HOME_URL="https://almalinux.org/" DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://wiki.almalinux.org/" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.almalinux.org/" ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT="AlmaLinux-8" ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="8.5"
we can use the command uname with a few switches to get OS and Kernel information:
uname -a
This displays the Kernel version as well as OS version, albeit a slightly cryptic way of reporting the OS version.
Linux controller 4.18.0-348.el8.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Nov 9 06:28:28 EST 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
uname -or
uname -or where the o is the operating system name and the r is the release.
4.18.0-348.el8.x86_64 GNU/Linux
We can also use the cat command to display the contents of /proc/version, use the following command for this:
cat /proc/version
This gives both the Kernel version and the OS release version.
Linux version 4.18.0-348.el8.x86_64 (mockbuild@koji.corp.cloudlinux.com) (gcc version 8.5.0 20210514 (Red Hat 8.5.0-3) (GCC)) #1 SMP Tue Nov 9 06:28:28 EST 2021