John C Nash wrote: : For some benchmarking tests I want to do, I'd like to be able to use : command line tools to get the following information (not only for Linux : -- my tests will be on Mac and PC too, but that will come later): : : - OS version, by which I mean not just the "uname -a" stuff, but also : whether I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 or Debian Lenny. /etc/*release seems to be a convention on every Linux box I've ever used. It's probably also taking a poke through sysctl; on FreeBSD, extended OS information can be found under kern.*: kern.osreldate, kern.ostype, and kern.osrevision. kern.version is essentially the output of uname -a. It's been a while since I've looked at something similar on Linux; might be worth taking a look. : - Processor (uname seems to be a bit sketchy on this) : - RAM installed (Is free good enough? It needs interpretation. I'd like : RAM available to the application I'm running.) /proc/*, as as already been stated. : - possibly other stuff If you're looking for things beyond available hardware resources, it's also worth looking at the following: - process accounting - sar - iostat - systat - vmstat - Damian