Hi, I recently asked in the dev channel by mistake about updating

os-release

contents so that a date is included that shows when the image was created. For example, silverblue does the following formatting style and is preserved in blue-build systems if you don't override the

PRETTY_NAME

entry.

Fedora Silverblue 43.20251105.0

I was told this wasn't supported, and since I wanted this same formatting, I tried doing my own modification with the following:

yaml
# ...
  - type: os-release
    properties:
      ID: fedora_maetel
      ID_LIKE: fedora
      Name: Maetel
      PRETTY_NAME: Maetel [Fedora] Image
  
  - type: containerfile
    snippets:
      - RUN sed -e 's/PRETTY_NAME=.*/PRETTY_NAME="Maetel [Fedora] '$( date +%y%m%d )'"/' /etc/os-release > /etc/os-release
# ...

This logically seemed like it wouldn't break the system, and AFAIK the

os-release

formatting is exactly as it should be. Any attempt to boot into this system however results in the following error:

error: Key file does not have key “VERSION_ID” in group “os-release”

There must be some other step I'm missing here. Any advice? Likewise, any chance this timestamping feature could be added to the nu script for the os-release module?

message has been deleted

You're using

> /etc/os-release

which overwrites the file entirely. I'd suggest piping through

tee

to see what's being put into the file

Ah, you're right that

tee

is the correct way to do this here. I wasn't aware of how the

>

redirect will truncate the target file first before running the

sed

operation, effectively nuking the file. Thanks for the help.