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What is the shell command to determine the version of Unix or Linux that is currently running?

What is the shell command to determine the number of CPU's?

Version

Usually some variant of uname, often "uname -a", but all sorts of other possibilies: -v, -X .. who knows? Depends on the flavor and in some cases even the version of that flavor.

Sometimes /etc/issue has what you want.. and on some systems a "cat *-release" or "cat *-version" may give results.

Oh, and one more thing:

Even when the man page tells you that uname -v gives you the version, it can be an entirely different interpretation of version than what you would think.

For example, on this 2.4 kernel Red Hat box, uname -r says 2.4.9-21. That's good. But uname -v gives "#1" and todays date (yes, I did build a new kernel today)

This 2.6 Linux shows me that PAEis enable with "-r": "2.6.18-238.5.1.el5PAE"

On the SCO system I'm trying to recover for a client to my left, uname -r says 3.2 and uname -v says "2", but uname -X says "Release=3.2v5.0.4" (and "5.0.4" is what's important there)

On the BSD box to my right, uname -r says 4.1.1-STABLE and -v says that and more.

Can't trust it unless you already know how it works :-)

Linux users can also "cat /proc/version", which is likely to give you something like this:

Linux version 2.6.18-238.5.1.el5PAE
(mockbuild@x86-005.build.bos.redhat.com) (gcc version 4.1.2
20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-50)) #1 SMP Mon Feb 21 06:01:16
EST 2011
 

CPU Info

For Linux, it's all in /proc/cpuinfo. If you only care about the number, "grep processor /proc/cpuinfo" will give you that.

Unixware and SunOS have "psrinfo", which will tell you about processors.

Unixware "idtype" will tell you the kind of kernel it is running (for example, whether or not SMP).

Speaking of cpu stuff, this How do I Find Out Linux CPU Utilization? is useful.

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