RHEL or Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the many operating systems provided by Red Hat. Red Hat is a popular Linux OS and has started functioning ever since the mid-1990s. Red Hat earned a good reputation due to being stable, regularly updated, and reliable.

If you are using RHEL and want to find its version, this article is for you. Now let’s check 7 useful methods to know what version of RHEL you are using.

Method 1: Track Your System with Hostnamectl

The hostnamectl command helps track your system’s appearance on a network. It also finds the operating system and its release version. So, this can be a quick way to check this information.

To use this command, open a terminal and type:

$ hostnamectl

In the output result, you’ll see the OS, kernel, and the architecture details.

Method 2: Use RPM Command

Red Hat Package Manager, abbreviated to RPM, is a well known core package management utility included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can identify the RHEL version you are using with this command.

Use RPM in the following manner.

$ rpm --query redhat-release

You can also identify CentOS’ (another OS offered by Red Hat) release version using the RPM command. To check, type:

$ rpm --query centos-release

As you enter the command suitable for your OS, the release version will appear on the screen.

Method 3: Check Red Hat Release File

Linux distributions based on Red Hat contain release files. You can find such files in the /etc/redhat-release directory. There are various types of Red hat release files, such as system-release, os-release, and redhat-release.

Check your Red Hat OS release version with the help of the below-given command.

$ cat /etc/redhat-release

To get more information, you can use the following commands.

$ cat /etc/system-release

$ cat /etc/os-release #contains more information

Method 4: Check within Red Hat Issue File

To check your Red Hat version, check within the /etc/issue file. To find the version, type:

$ cat /etc/issue

Method 5: Use lsb_release Command

LSB stands for Linux Standard Base. The lsb_release command shows the Linux distribution information and some LSB. On RHEL, the lsb_release is provided within the redhat_lsb. You can simply install the redhat_lsb package to use the command. To install, type: