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, allowing applications to read the file without implementing a shell compatible execution engine. /etc/os-release contains data that is defined by the operating system vendor and should not be changed by the administrator. 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, 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. 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 names, 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 an 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=15 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