I believe he said "kernel", not "shell". In which case you would do this:
$ cut -d' ' -f3 /proc/version
or
$ dmesg | grep "^Linux version" | cut -d' ' -f3
But you really want to find out what your login shell is you could:
$ chsh
or
$ grep $USER /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f7
or
$ echo $SHELL
or
$ env | grep SHELL
or
$ set | grep -i shell
or
$ which $SHELL
or
$ lkasjdflkasjdf
which will produce an error message indicating the shell from which the error was produced (in most shells, but not in csh/tcsh).
[ October 31, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]