Unix Programming - recognize UNIX version

Author

recognize UNIX version

Darko M.

2004-05-12, 9:08 pm

Is there any portable way of recognizing which version of UNIX (or
Linux, for me it's a sort of) is the software being installed on
(preprocessor way), or which version of UNIX is the software being
running on?

I'm kind of ready to suffer looking for all the non-typical system
calls and functions and porting them to various (modern) versions of
UNIX.

Something like sysconf or #ifdef UNIXBSD, blabla...

I would also like if I could find a table or something where I would
have all the different syscalls listed in various versions of UNIX (I
know I want too much :)

Well?

Thanks.

Eric Enright

2004-05-12, 9:08 pm

On Tue, 11 May 2004 10:58:55 -0700, Darko M. wrote:

> Is there any portable way of recognizing which version of UNIX (or
> Linux, for me it's a sort of) is the software being installed on
> (preprocessor way), or which version of UNIX is the software being
> running on?

Two easy ways I can think of are to popen uname, and check the MACHTYPE
environment variable (not sure how portable that last one is, but it's
present on my Linux and Sol9).

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Barry Margolin

2004-05-12, 9:08 pm

In article <ef663480.0405110958.aa60590@posting.google.com>,
mdanko@tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu (Darko M.) wrote:

> Is there any portable way of recognizing which version of UNIX (or
> Linux, for me it's a sort of) is the software being installed on
> (preprocessor way), or which version of UNIX is the software being
> running on?

This is usually not a useful thing to do. It's much better to
conditionalize on individual features rather than the OS version. Have
you looked at GNU autoconf?

--
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

Bjorn Reese

2004-05-12, 9:08 pm

Levente KOVACS

2004-05-12, 9:08 pm

On 11 May 2004 10:58:55 -0700
mdanko@tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu (Darko M.) wrote:

> Is there any portable way of recognizing which version of UNIX (or
> Linux, for me it's a sort of) is the software being installed on
> (preprocessor way), or which version of UNIX is the software being
> running on?

You should write a ./configure shell script, which generates makefile,
and config.h. You should include config.h in your program.

There's a program called uname, which comes with every UNIX platforms.
See man uname.

The ./configure shell script shall execute such commands like

SYSTEM=`uname -s`
..
..
..
echo "#define SYSTEM $SYSTEM" >>config.h

Or something like that.

You can add flags to your cc, and/or linker like

CCFLAGS=`gtk-config --cflags`
LDFLAGS=`gtk-config --link`
..
..
..

echo CCFLAGS=$CCFLAGS >>Makefile
echo LDFLAGS=$LDFALGS >>Makefile

And, the rest of your Makefile shall use thoes variables.

I know, that autoconf does this, but for me it's too complicated, and
sometime I run into problems (e.g. with the gEDA tools).

I just made this mail, I do not run things like this...yet. But I'm
thinkink about writing some scripts.

Anyway... I hope it helped.

Levente

--
Leva

__

Email: levente.kovacs@cern.ch
Home Page: http://web.interware.hu/leva
Public key: http://web.interware.hu/leva/CERN/public_key

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