systemd Developer Lennart Poettering lennart@poettering.net os-release 5 os-release Operating system identification /etc/os-release The /etc/os-release file contains operating system identification data. The basic file format of os-release is a newline-separated list of environment-like shell-compatible variable assignments. It is possible to source the configuration from shell scripts, however, beyond mere variable assignments no shell features are supported (this means variable expansion is explicitly not supported), allowing applications to read the file without implementing a shell compatible execution engine. Variable assignment values should be enclosed in double or single quotes if they include spaces, semicolons or other special characters outside of A-Z, a-z, 0-9. All strings should be in UTF-8 format, and non-printable characters should not be used. If double or single quotes or backslashes are to be used within variable assignments they should be escaped with backslashes, following shell style. It is not supported to concatenate multiple individually quoted strings. Lines beginning with "#" shall be ignored as comments. /etc/os-release contains data that is defined by the operating system vendor and should not be changed by the administrator. As this file only encodes names and identifiers it should not be localized. For a longer rationale for /etc/os-release please refer to the Announcement of /etc/os-release. The following OS identifications parameters may be set using /etc/os-release: NAME= A string identifying the operating system, without a version component, and suitable for presentation to the user. If not set defaults to NAME=Linux. Example: NAME=Fedora or NAME="Debian GNU/Linux". VERSION= A string identifying the operating system version, excluding any OS name information, possibly including a release code name, and suitable for presentation to the user. This field is optional. Example: VERSION=17 or VERSION="17 (Beefy Miracle)". ID= A lower-case string (no spaces or other characters outside of 0-9, a-z, ".", "_" and "-") identifying the operating system, excluding any version information and suitable for processing by scripts or usage in generated file names. If not set defaults to ID=linux. Example: ID=fedora or ID=debian. ID_LIKE= A space-separated list of operating system identifiers in the same syntax as the ID= setting. Should list identifiers of operating systems that are closely related to the local operating system in regards to packaging and programming interfaces, for example listing one or more distribution identifiers the local distribution is a derivative from. Build scripts and similar should check this variable if they need to identify the local operating system and the value of ID= is not recognized. Operating systems should be listed in order of how closely the local operating system relates to the listed ones, starting with the closest. This field is optional. Example: for an operating system with ID=centos an assignment of ID_LIKE="rhel fedora" would be appropriate. For an operating systemd with ID=ubuntu an assignment of ID_LIKE=debian is appropriate. VERSION_ID= A lower-case string (mostly numeric, no spaces or other characters outside of 0-9, a-z, ".", "_" and "-") identifying the operating system version, excluding any OS name information or release code name, and suitable for processing by scripts or usage in generated file names. This field is optional. Example: VERSION_ID=17 or VERSION_ID=11.04. PRETTY_NAME= A pretty operating system name in a format suitable for presentation to the user. May or may not contain a release code name or OS version of some kind, as suitable. If not set defaults to PRETTY_NAME="Linux". Example: PRETTY_NAME="Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle)". ANSI_COLOR= A suggested presentation color when showing the distribution name on the console. This should be specified as string suitable for inclusion in the ESC [ m ANSI/ECMA-48 escape code for setting graphical rendition. This field is optional. Example: ANSI_COLOR="0;31" for red, or ANSI_COLOR="1;34" for light blue. CPE_NAME= A CPE name for the operating system, following the Common Platform Enumeration Specification as proposed by the MITRE Corporation. This field is optional. Example: CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:17" If you are reading this file from C code or a shell script to determine the OS or a specific version of it, use the ID and VERSION_ID fields. When looking for an OS identification string for presentation to the user use the PRETTY_NAME field. Note that operating system vendors may choose not to provide version information, for example to accommodate for rolling releases. In this case VERSION and VERSION_ID may be unset. Applications should not rely on these fields to be set. NAME=Fedora VERSION="17 (Beefy Miracle)" ID=fedora VERSION_ID=17 PRETTY_NAME="Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle)" ANSI_COLOR="0;34" CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:17" systemd1, lsb_release1, hostname5, machine-id5, machine-info5