CentOS: lsb_release: command not found

First let me declare that I’m new to CentOS. The folowing is a note to self which demonstrates how we search for a package that provides some commands and intall it using yum on CentOS.

When I ran ‘lsb_release -a’, the following message is returned:

-bash: lbs_release: command not found

To fix it, we need to install the package which provides lsb_release command.

# yum provides */lsb_release
...
redhat-lsb-4.0-3.el6.centos.i686 : LSB base libraries support for CentOS
Repo        : base
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/lsb_release

redhat-lsb-4.0-3.el6.centos.x86_64 : LSB base libraries support for CentOS
Repo        : base
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/lsb_release

dkms-2.2.0.3-2.el6.noarch : Dynamic Kernel Module Support Framework
Repo        : epel
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/lib/dkms/lsb_release

So, let’s install redhat-lsb package:

# yum install redhat-lsb

...
Transaction Summary
==========================================================
Install     106 Package(s)

Total download size: 86 M
Installed size: 246 M
Is this ok [y/N]: 
...

Wow, it needs to download 86M just to install that package? Well, I guess I’ll stick with cat /etc/redhat-release.