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 18:30 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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