need a good way to determine the OS from a BASH script

[Eric Battersby]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2011, Digimer wrote:

> On 03/22/2011 12:03 PM, bob 295 wrote:
> > I'm in the process of debugging a Mac version of my SIMPL open source toolkit.
> > With the GNU tools installed on the Mac the SIMPL toolkit compiles straight
> > up without any conditional compilation ifdefs.    However, I've encountered
> > an issue with the shmctl() function.    Linux allows a process to shmat()
> > even if the segment was previously marked for destruction.   The Mac does
> > not.   The reason for marking immediately after creation is to prevent shared
> > memory leaks in cases of aborted processes.    As a result of this difference
> > I'm going to have to introduce a conditional compile ifdef for the MACOSX.
> >
> > Ideally I'd like to be able to detect that I'm about to compile on the MAC
> > inside the Makefile (or at least in the install script).    Any ideas on how
> > one could reliably detect a Linux OS as opposed to a Mac OS?
> >
> > Thanks in advance for your help.
> >
> > bob
>
> Though it's not technically it's purpose; I've had good luck checking
> /etc/issue for distro name and version info.

Unless you need the minor distro release number,
how is that better than 'uname -a' and then parsing the output,
specifically the first and third fields, especially if you
want maximum Unix/Linux portability?

Does anyone know what Mac OS returns from 'uname -a'?

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