Find the unix platform name

Question

I want to be able to determine the output folder based on the platform name: AS3, AS4, AS5, SUN.

I couldn't figure out how to extract the platform name from the system. I experimented with:

uname -a

file /bin/bash

Thanks

Solution

./lsb_release -a

Kudos to Paul Dixon

Answer 1

I think you'll have to look in a specific file for each OS. For example, on SunOS, you can type:

uname -s -r -v

For RHEL, check /etc/issue.

Answer 2

Some linux systems will have support for lsb_release

Answer 3

You can include sys/utsname.h to get OS information on Unix platforms.

struct utsname buf;
uname(&buf);
cout << buf.sysname << endl;

This will at least give you the name of the platform. I'm not sure what you mean by "output folder", so I'm not sure what you need to do after that.

Answer 4

It looks like you want (at least in part) the release number. On Red Hat, you can get the release like this:

> cat /etc/redhat-release 
CentOS release 4.3 (Final)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 4)

A lot of other Linux distributions have their own files in /etc that give release numbers, too:

• /etc/redhat-release
• /etc/SuSE-release
• /etc/ubuntu-release
• /etc/fedora-release

etc.

Answer 5

In the past (pre-Linux even) I've found /bin/arch to be reasonably common across Unix systems and useful for getting some information about your hardware platform. (On Linux it returns the same as uname -m).