terminal command ... What is my current linux distribution

uname -a

Thank you. That is exactly what I was looking for.

However, it only told me that it was Linux, nothingf about the distribution. It did tell me some other little things (since the switch you provided me was --all), but I still don't know what distro it is. The situation is that I am trying to find out what distro my webhost is running.

Can you advise me of possibly another way to determine what I am dealing with? For instance, does Red Hat have certain characteristics that other distros don't that can be discerned from the terminal? Or ... I know distros built from debian have a slightly different directory/partition structure. Are there any small unique characteristics like this that might give a particular distro away?

I'm only looking for clues on the 2-3 most common ones. I hope that I am making sense and making clear what I am looking for.

Thanks again,
bubone2

Here is a list of files that could identify your distro.

Novell SuSE
/etc/SuSE-release

Red Hat
/etc/redhat-release, /etc/redhat_version

Fedora
/etc/fedora-release

Slackware
/etc/slackware-release, /etc/slackware-version

Debian
/etc/debian_release, /etc/debian_version,

Mandrake
/etc/mandrake-release

Yellow dog
/etc/yellowdog-release

Sun JDS
/etc/sun-release

Solaris/Sparc
/etc/release

Gentoo
/etc/gentoo-release

Wow thanks again Moltar!

Which makes me wonder -- why isn't there something like a standard /etc/release file? There should be some straightforward way to determine the *nix/Linux version one is using, that doesn't involve checking an unknown number of files.

cat /etc/issue

Always worked for me.