NAME

uname — get system identification

LIBRARY

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

int
uname(struct utsname *name);

The uname() function stores nul-terminated strings of information identifying the current system into the structure referenced by name.

The utsname structure is defined in the <sys/utsname.h> header file, and contains the following members:

sysname: Name of the operating system implementation. Equivalent to the sysctl(7) kern.ostype variable.
nodename: Network name of this machine. Equivalent to the sysctl(7) kern.hostname variable.
release: Release level of the operating system. Equivalent to the sysctl(7) kern.osrelease variable.
version: Version level of the operating system. Equivalent to the sysctl(7) kern.version variable, except that very long values are truncated, and newlines are converted to spaces.
machine: Machine hardware platform. Equivalent to the sysctl(7) hw.machine variable.

If uname is successful, 0 is returned, otherwise, -1 is returned and errno is set appropriately.

The uname() function may fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the library functions sysctl(3).

The uname() function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-1990 (“POSIX.1”).

The uname function first appeared in 4.4BSD.