Gilles Schipper replies,

I think your command is correct - but your timing's a bit off.

If you re-issue the command, you will see all the numbers were actually reset, but the numbers you saw the first time were those just prior to the command taking effect.

"uname -i" will return the HPSUSAN on an HP-UX machine, just as "showvar hpsusan" would on an HP 3000. Calling HPCIGETVAR for the value "HPSUSAN" from within a program would allow me access to that value during a run. What is the equivalent on an HP-UX box?

Ken Hirsch replies,

If you're programming in Perl, you could say:

my $susan = `uname -i`;
chomp($susan);  # remove line feed from end
print "susan = '$susan'\n";

In C, it would be easier to call the uname() function:

#include <sys/utsname.h>
#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
 struct utsname u;
 if (uname(&u) < 0) {
   perror("uname");
   exit(1);
 } else {
   printf("id = %s\n", u.idnumber);
 }
 exit(0);
}
#include <sys/utsname.h>
#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
 struct utsname u;
 if (uname(&u) < 0) {
   perror("uname");
   exit(1);
 } else {
   printf("id = %s\n", u.idnumber);
 }
 exit(0);
}

In the “how would I know that?” category, if you look at the bottom of the “uname” man page, it says SEE ALSO: getconf(1), hostname(1), model(1), setuname(1M), gethostname(2), sethostname(2), uname(2), hostname(5).

Section 2 of the manual has system calls and Section 3 library functions, so that’s what you want for programmatic access. Just type “man 2 uname” at the shell prompt.