How to tell which Ubuntu version you have
If you’re revisiting some old servers you’ve played around before, or maybe installed and forgot about it, you may not remember the exact distribution name. Sure you can uname -a then get the kernel version from there then google it up which distro has that kernel version; or just use
$ lsb_release -a
lsb_release is used to print distribution specific information, it will tell you the release number, a description of your distro and the codename, among other things; The -a flag means display all information, if you want to learn more about the flags you can use with lsb_release, just go ahead and $ info lsb_release
While the post title is “how to tell which Ubuntu version you have”, I’ve used the lsb_release command on my CentOS servers and a few others, lsb is short for Linux Standards Base, it is a joint project by a couple of Linux vendors so that the OS environment can achieve standardization. Linux distributions that are part of the LSB do quite share a few commands, this command (lsb_release), is one of them.
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