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 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.

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 versions 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

platform                                              1.0.4                                       platform(3tcl)