System Identification

primitive: uname

Returns an object with some information about the computer system the program is running on.

The following procedures accept an object as returned by uname and return a selected component.

utsname:sysname

The name of the operating system.

utsname:nodename

The network name of the computer.

utsname:release

The current release level of the operating system implementation.

utsname:version

The current version level within the release of the operating system.

utsname:machine

A description of the hardware.

primitive: software-type

Return a symbol describing the current platform's operating system. This may be one of AIX, VMS, UNIX, COHERENT, WINDOWS, MS-DOS, OS/2, THINKC, AMIGA, ATARIST, MACH, or ACORN.

Note that most varieties of Unix are considered to be simply "UNIX". That is because when a program depends on features that are not present on every operating system, it is usually better to test for the presence or absence of that specific feature. The return value of software-type should only be used for this purpose when there is no other easy or unambiguous way of detecting such features.

Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.