&gt; I have also been trying to write some scripts that work across multiple distros. Detecting distros is wierd. &quot;lsb-release&quot; is not present in most distros. &quot;&#x2F;etc&#x2F;issue.net&quot; is present in some, but not on ArchLinux.<p>Try &#x2F;etc&#x2F;os-release first (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freedesktop.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;man&#x2F;os-release.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freedesktop.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;man&#x2F;os-release.h...</a>). It should be present in all modern distros (even if they don&#x27;t use systemd).