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38.12 System Identification

This section lists the various procedures Guile provides for accessing information about the system it runs on.

uname Scheme Procedure
scm_uname () C Function
Return 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.

gethostname Scheme Procedure
scm_gethostname () C Function
Return the host name of the current processor.

sethostname name Scheme Procedure
scm_sethostname (name) C Function
Set the host name of the current processor to name. May only be used by the superuser. The return value is not specified.

software-type Scheme Procedure
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.