Wordpress - Determining WordPress' Version from the Host's Command Line?

Just run this grep command from the command line:

grep wp_version wp-includes/version.php

I use this command to find all installs of WordPress on my VPS server

find /home/*/public_html/ -type f -iwholename "*/wp-includes/version.php" -exec grep -H "\$wp_version =" {} \;

Its a really quick way to find out which accounts are out of date.

You can also just go to http://example.com/readme.html in a web browser The readme file ships with every version of WordPress and displays the installed version number prominently at the top of the page.

Also, if you can view your site’s front-end (I know you said you can't access the dashboard, so I’m just assuming your blog is public), you can “view source” to see the installed version number. There’s a meta tag called generator that displays the current WordPress version:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0.1" />

No need to use grep at all.