platform - System identification support code and utilities
package require platform ?1.0.10? platform::generic platform::identify platform::patterns identifier
platform(1t) Tcl Bundled Packages platform(1t)
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NAME
platform - System identification support code and utilities
SYNOPSIS
package require platform ?1.0.10?
platform::generic
platform::identify
platform::patterns identifier
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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 conven-
tions.
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 plat-
form::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::iden-
tify and returns a list of identifiers describing compatible
architectures.
EXAMPLE
This can be used to allow an application to be shipped with multiple
builds of a shared library, so that the same package works on many ver-
sions of an operating system. For example:
package require platform
# Assume that app script is .../theapp/bin/theapp.tcl
set binDir [file dirname [file normalize [info script]]]
set libDir [file join $binDir .. lib]
set platLibDir [file join $libDir [platform::identify]]
load [file join $platLibDir support[info sharedlibextension]]
KEYWORDS
operating system, cpu architecture, platform, architecture
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+---------------+------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+------------------+
|Availability | runtime/tcl-8 |
+---------------+------------------+
|Stability | Uncommitted |
+---------------+------------------+
NOTES
Source code for open source software components in Oracle Solaris can
be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
code-downloads.html.
This software was built from source available at
https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland. The original community
source was downloaded from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tcl/tcl-
core8.6.7-src.tar.gz.
Further information about this software can be found on the open source
community website at https://www.tcl.tk/.
platform 1.0.4 platform(1t)