[plug] What's the best way to get kernel version from a binary?

[Brad Campbell]

On 24/11/16 11:35, Bill Kenworthy wrote:
> What's the best way to get kernel version from a binary?
>
> Context is that the raspberry pi stock firware doesn’t use version
> numbers in the filename and I want to know what kernel version I am
> building a custom initrd using dracut for a btrfs on root filesystem.
>
> Easy to get manually (strings|grep the file) but its clumsy and hard to
> get precision in a script and uname doesn’t work on a file :(
>
> BillK
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This is how I've done it for years now, it works no matter what weird 
extensions get put on the version. :

brad at srv:/raid10/src/linux-stable$ strings vmlinux | grep "Linux 
version" | awk '{print $3}'
4.8.6
brad at srv:/raid10/src/linux-stable$ strings vmlinux | grep "Linux version"
Linux version 4.8.6 (brad at srv) (gcc version 4.7.2 (Debian 4.7.2-5) ) #8 
SMP Mon Nov 7 14:36:58 AWST 2016