Get only part of uname -r in bash

Question

I need to get only first two numbers of "uname -r" command in bash

example of regular out put:

uname -r
3.5.0-18-generic

what I expect using magic bash options:

3.5

Answer 1

assuming you want everything before the second dot, this will do what you want:

uname -r | cut -d. -f1-2

uname itself does not support cutting the output, afaik. The pipe through cut will show you fields 1 and 2 (-f1-2), delimited by dots (-d.)