Supporting Multiple Distros in Scripts

At home I am a Slackware user. At work I support Debian and CentOS systems. Often when I write shell scripts I need to distinguish which distro I am running. I use a simple conditional logic test.

    if [ -r "/etc/os-release" ]; then
      RELEASE_FILE="/etc/os-release"
    elif [ -r "/etc/system-release" ]; then
      RELEASE_FILE="/etc/system-release"
    elif [ -r "/etc/debian_version" ]; then
      RELEASE_FILE="/etc/debian_version"
    elif [ -r "/etc/centos-release" ]; then
      RELEASE_FILE="/etc/centos-release"
    elif [ -r "/etc/redhat-release" ]; then
      RELEASE_FILE="/etc/redhat-release"
    elif [ -r "/etc/slackware-version" ]; then
      RELEASE_FILE="/etc/slackware-version"
    fi

From there I can test the contents of the $RELEASE_FILE variables to know in which operating system the script is running.

Posted: December 06, 2020 Category: Usability Tagged: General

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