A rather general-purpose way to check for *nix is to cat /etc/issue.net, which is the login-banner for a remote shell connection. These usually default to a line with the OS version and hostname, printed before the login prompt.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org [mailto:owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org] On Behalf Of Greg Troxel Sent: Monday, January 19, 2015 19:28 To: Eric Schnoebelen Cc: Jean-Louis Martineau; amanda-users@amanda.org Subject: Re: sw_vers not found on FreeBSD e...@cirr.com (Eric Schnoebelen) writes: > Jean-Louis Martineau writes: > - selfcheck try to return the distro and version of the OS. > - How can it get that information on freebsd? or other bsd? > - How to get the 'FreeBSD' string and the '10.1' string? > > uname -s -> 'FreeBSD'/'NetBSD'/'OpenBSD'/'DragonFlyBSD' > uname -r -> '10.1'/'6.1_STABLE'/... > > "uname -s" provides the system name, and "uname -r" provides the OS > revision (on every UNIX family system except Linux, where they return > "Linux" and the kernel revision. A side effect of how Linux > distributions are created.) Note that uname is specified by POSIX: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/uname.html So really, uname output should be used first, and if there needs to be some Linux-specific extra information because of "distributions", that should be special-case code for Linux. FWIW, uname -s and -r on a NetBSD box: NetBSD 6.1_STABLE
