indentifying desktop enviro

[Fezz]

Kind of an odd question, but I'm looking for the best way to identify what distro the user is running and what the desktop environment is running. I'm building some pipeline tools for a visual effects studio and need some generic commands for passing paths to the user's file manager from within Maya and Nuke. The workstations I have access to are FC12 with xfce4 so for that I'd pass a system command :

("thunar "+$path)

I've been identifying Fedora workstations with:

# cat /etc/issue

Is there a command to identify what the current window manager is? Preferably something generic that'll work on the other distros as well. Thanks in advance

[cheesecake42]

I'm not sure if there's an easy command that will do it for you but you could deffinately do the following to see whether or not gnome is running on the system:

ps aux | grep gnome-session

Or you could run the following just to see if it is installed regardless if it is running:

ls /etc | grep gnome*

hope that helps you at all.

[tornow]

Most environments and wm's i know are to be found under /usr/bin and contain either a "session" or a "start".
So if you do a "ps aux | grep session" it might help you (There should be, of course a command to exactly figure it out, but i don't know it)

[reed9]

For identifying the distro, there is usually a file /etc/*-release which tells you what is running.

More info here.