On 11/11/2017 11:04 AM, Dimitri Maziuk wrote: > On 2017-11-11 12:22, Phil Stracchino wrote: >> Heh, I just looked at that myself. How did such a useless tool ever >> become standard? > My guess is IIRC SunOS was on Solaris 8 by 2001, and it was *the* > grown-up 64-bit unix: every other unix vendor's keeled over or was > about to and x86_64 didn't exist. So it was a standard utility on the > standard unix by the time when posix decided in 2001 The Standard > Shall Be That Other Thing. Good thing about standards, as we all know, > is there's plenty to choose from.
arch(1) dates back to at least SunOS 4.0, ca 1987. I haven't been able to find manual pages before that. The competitor, "uname -m", dates back at least that far, in the System V branch of UNIX - it's in the SVID in 1986. Much before that you find the "machid" system-type commands, e.g. the "vax" command that succeeds on a vax and fails on all other systems. (and: sun, iAPX286, i386, m68k, pdp11, sparc, u3b, u3b2, u3b5, u3b15.) Those are still present at SunOS 4.0, but not in SVID. (Strangely, I don't see them in BSD 4.x. I dimly remember them existing in a BSD derivative ca 1985.) UNIX v7 (my manual © 1979, 1983) does not have any of those. I suspect that at that time there was only Zool. Er, PDP-11. So I think the simple answer is that both the Sun/Berkeley fork and the AT&T/SysV fork realized the need for a better answer than the "machid" commands, and independently invented different answers. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
