How to determine the maintenance level of a Red Hat or SUSE operating system

Technote (FAQ)


Question
How can the maintenance level of a Red Hat or SUSE operating system be determined?

Answer
There are a number of situations where determining the maintenance level of a Red Hat or SUSE operating system may be necessary while working with WebSphere Application Server. One possible scenario would be to determine if the current maintenance level is supported or has some diagnostic capability.


The maintenance level (Update / Service Pack) of a Red Hat or SUSE operating system can be determined by inspecting the contents of the following files:


Red Hat:
/etc/redhat-release

Example:
>> cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.4 (Tikanga)
This indicates RHEL 5 Update 4 is being used.

SUSE:
/etc/SuSE-release

Example:
>> cat /etc/SuSE-release
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (i586)
VERSION = 11
PATCHLEVEL = 0

This indicates that SLES 11 is being used without a Service Pack.