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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: system identification
Keywords: system unix vms
Message-ID: <1990Oct12.002015.14152@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 90 00:20:15 GMT
References: <40309@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Sender: news@csrd.uiuc.edu (news)
Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
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mdeck@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Mary Deck) writes:

>Here's a question for anyone who wants to answer it (and can): Is
>there a way in (La)TeX to identify the type of system one is on?  For

Interesting question.

Direct answer: no. TeX doesn't have many bindings to the
operating system it lives on.

Indirect answer: sure. You can for instance make the plain.fmt
or lplain.fmt (whatever you use, plain TeX or LaTeX) again,
but add statements
\everyjob{\def\system{VAX}}
and
\everyjob{\def\system{Sun}}
at the end. The \everyjob commands are automatically
executed at the start of a job, so the macro \system
will always be defined, and you can simply check what it
is defined like.

This may mean that you'll have to persuade systems people
to redump the formats, but I think this is the simplest solution.

Victor.