Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!frankland-river!pem
From: pem@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au (Paul E. Maisano)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: gethostname() in perl
Message-ID: <1018@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au>
Date: 7 Feb 90 05:13:54 GMT
Organization: Australian AI Institute
Lines: 25

This is how I find the hostname of the machine I am running on.

    do 'syscall.pl' || die "syscall.pl: $@\n";

    $host = "\0" x 100;		# pre-nulled buffer for hostname
    syscall($SYS_GETHOSTNAME, $host, length($host));

syscall.pl is just of file of system call numbers.

I do this because I hate starting up new processes just to find out things
like hostname and date etc.

It seems a little messy, having to do a direct system call though.
Is there another way, or should perl have a gethostname built in function ?

I have translated quite a few shell scripts lately, mainly for speed
and the hostname function is about the only thing I can recall having
trouble implementing directly in perl (excepting the syscall method above).

------------------
Paul E. Maisano
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute
1 Grattan St. Carlton, Vic. 3053, Australia
Ph: +613 663-7922  Fax: +613 663-7937
Email: pem@aaii.oz.au