freebsd-version(1) manual page

Manual Pages — FREEBSD-VERSION

NAME

freebsd-version – print the version and patch level of the installed system

SYNOPSIS

freebsd-version [-kru]

DESCRIPTION

The freebsd-version utility makes a best effort to determine the version and patch level of the installed kernel and / or userland.

The following options are available:

-k

Print the version and patch level of the installed kernel. Unlike uname(1), if a new kernel has been installed but the system has not yet rebooted, freebsd-version will print the version and patch level of the new kernel.

-r

Print the version and patch level of the running kernel. Unlike uname(1), this is unaffected by environment variables.

-u

Print the version and patch level of the installed userland. These are hardcoded into freebsd-version during the build.

If several of the above options are specified, freebsd-version will print the installed kernel version first, then the running kernel version, and finally the userland version, on separate lines. If neither is specified, it will print the userland version only.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

The freebsd-version utility should provide the correct answer in the vast majority of cases, including on systems kept up-to-date using freebsd-update(8), which does not update the kernel version unless the kernel itself was affected by the latest patch.

To determine the name (and hence the location) of a custom kernel, the freebsd-version utility will attempt to parse /boot/defaults/loader.conf and /boot/loader.conf, looking for definitions of the kernel and bootfile variables, both with a default value of "kernel". It may however fail to locate the correct kernel if either or both of these variables are defined in a non-standard location, such as in /boot/loader.rc.

ENVIRONMENT

ROOT Path to the root of the filesystem in which to look for loader.conf and the kernel.

EXAMPLES

To determine the version of the currently running userland:

/bin/freebsd-version -u

To inspect a system being repaired using a live CD:

mount -rt ufs /dev/ada0p2 /mnt
env ROOT=/mnt /mnt/bin/freebsd-version -ku

HISTORY

The freebsd-version command appeared in FreeBSD 10.0 .

AUTHORS

The freebsd-version utility and this manual page were written by Dag-Erling Sm/orgrav <Mt des@FreeBSD.org>.

FREEBSD-VERSION (1)

November 14, 2017

Please direct any comments about this manual page service to Ben Bullock.

“

I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have to named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff).

”