This guide will get right to the point and show you how to check your ubuntu version. For fast results please open a terminal, we will use the terminal for all actions to get quick information. After your terminal is open you should have a window like this open.

The first command you can try is lsb_release. Use the -a flag to see all the outputs.

You can see in the above code and screen shot that the version of Ubuntu is displayed. You can get this into a variable in bash with a simple grep and awk command as shown below:

In the above code we use grep to the find Description, awk to get the second field after the colon, and xargs to stream the leading whitespace.

Also note you can use the command $ cat /etc/os-release

uname is a popular command, but it may not give what you are searching for in this use case.

Conclusion

Use lsb_release command to quickly find the Ubuntu version from the terminal in Ubuntu, lsb_release is the best command to find distribution specific information from the terminal.