Re: Possible bug in uname command

[Paul Eggert]

"Asif Iqbal, Trumboo" <address@hidden> writes:

> There seems to be a possible bug in uname command on most versions of
> the Linux system.
> uname -p prints 'unknown' instead of the host processor name.

As I understand it, that is a deficiency in the Linux API rather than
a bug in coreutils proper: Linux doesn't support the relevant sysinfo
(Solaris-style) or sysctl (BSD-style) system calls.  Perhaps you can
report the problem to the Linux kernel folks.

In the meantime I installed the following documentation patch to
coreutils.

2005-09-13  Paul Eggert  <address@hidden>

        * doc/coreutils.texi (uname invocation): Mention that Linux outputs
        "unknown" for -i and -p.

--- doc/coreutils.texi  13 Sep 2005 22:07:58 -0000      1.280
+++ doc/coreutils.texi  13 Sep 2005 23:01:59 -0000      1.282
@@ -12225,6 +12225,8 @@ Print all of the below information.
 @cindex platform, hardware
 Print the hardware platform name
 (sometimes called the hardware implementation).
+Print @samp{unknown} if the kernel does not make this information
+easily available, as is the case with Linux kernels.
 
 @item -m
 @itemx --machine
@@ -12252,6 +12254,8 @@ Print the network node hostname.
 @cindex host processor type
 Print the processor type (sometimes called the instruction set
 architecture or ISA).
+Print @samp{unknown} if the kernel does not make this information
+easily available, as is the case with Linux kernels.
 
 @item -o
 @itemx --operating-system