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I want to retrieve the current BIOS version and name while working on the terminal.

What could be the commands to find it?

Answers

BIOS version is exposed through the SMBIOS tables. On Linux, we can access this with dmidecode (which requires root privileges to run).

To show only BIOS information, use -t bios to specify that we only want to see entries of the type BIOS, and -q to silence unnecessary output.

# dmidecode -t bios -q
BIOS Information
        Vendor: Phoenix Technologies LTD
        Version: 6.00
        Release Date: 02/22/2012
        Address: 0xE72C0
        Runtime Size: 101696 bytes
        ROM Size: 64 kB
        Characteristics:
                ISA is supported
                PCI is supported
                ...
        BIOS Revision: 4.6
        Firmware Revision: 0.0

To get just the BIOS version information, use -s to specify certain strings:

# dmidecode -s bios-vendor
Phoenix Technologies LTD
# dmidecode -s bios-version
6.00
# dmidecode -s bios-release-date
02/22/2012