NAME¶
platform - System identification support code and utilities
SYNOPSIS¶
package require platform ?1.0.4?
platform::generic
platform::identify
platform::patterns identifier
DESCRIPTION¶
The
platform package provides several utility commands useful for the
identification of the architecture of a machine running Tcl.
Whilst Tcl provides the
tcl_platform array for identifying the current
architecture (in particular, the platform and machine elements) this is not
always sufficient. This is because (on Unix machines)
tcl_platform
reflects the values returned by the
uname command and these are not
standardized across platforms and architectures. In addition, on at least one
platform (AIX) the
tcl_platform(machine) contains the CPU serial
number.
Consequently, individual applications need to manipulate the values in
tcl_platform (along with the output of system specific utilities) -
which is both inconvenient for developers, and introduces the potential for
inconsistencies in identifying architectures and in naming conventions.
The
platform package prevents such fragmentation - i.e., it establishes a
standard naming convention for architectures running Tcl and makes it more
convenient for developers to identify the current architecture a Tcl program
is running on.
COMMANDS¶
- platform::identify
- This command returns an identifier describing the platform
the Tcl core is running on. The returned identifier has the general format
OS-CPU. The OS part of the identifier may contain
details like kernel version, libc version, etc., and this information may
contain dashes as well. The CPU part will not contain dashes,
making the preceding dash the last dash in the result.
- platform::generic
- This command returns a simplified identifier describing the
platform the Tcl core is running on. In contrast to
platform::identify it leaves out details like kernel version, libc
version, etc. The returned identifier has the general format
OS-CPU.
- platform::patterns identifier
- This command takes an identifier as returned by
platform::identify and returns a list of identifiers describing
compatible architectures.
KEYWORDS¶
operating system, cpu architecture, platform, architecture