Noel Kuntze wrote: > It seems to me that the options for uname, more precise, -v and -r have > been interchanged.
The uname program dates back to the days of yore before we had refined networking to the mature state that it is now. It is really a terrible interface. Although we often use 'uname -a' to identify systems it isn't out of love but simple practicality that there isn't much better available. If you collected the output of uname with various options on every different system you could find you would have quite a collection of random output! At that point you would understand the problem. The only portable use of uname is without arguments. To use it portably you can only really use it first to figure out which system you are on and then follow that up with subsequent calls with system specific options. I often do this type of thing in scripts: case $(uname) in HP-UX) case $(uname -m) in 9000/*) case $(getconf CPU_VERSION) in 528) mach=hppa1.1 ;; 532) mach=hppa2.0 ;; 768) mach=ia64 ;; esac ;; *) mach=$(uname -m) ;; esac sys=hpux$(uname -r | sed 's/^[AB]\.//') ;; Linux) sys=gnulinux mach=$(uname -m) ;; AIX) sys=aix mach=rs6000 ... ;; esac That is just an example. Such as for AIX I would need to do more but I didn't want to keep going with the example. Bob