HP-UX 11i December 2004 Release Notes

Programming
Miscellaneous
Chapter 15
331
Machine Identifier Changes to confstr
new at 11i
original release
New machine identifier, partition identifier, and serial number parameters have been
defined for the confstr() library function.
The new parameters for confstr() are defined as follows:
_CS_MACHINE_IDENT
Identifier for each physical machine. Returned as an opaque string of
printable ascii characters.This string has the same value for all
partitions in a physical machine. For hardware classes first released
with HP-UX 11i or later, this ID is unique across all hardware classes.
For earlier hardware classes, the ID number is unique only within the
hardware class. A null string is returned if no ID number is available;
this is expected to be the case only for prototype machines or other
systems improperly configured in manufacturing.
_CS_PARTITION_IDENT
Identifier for each partition existing on a machine. Returned as an
opaque string of printable ascii characters. For any machine not
supporting partitions this value will be same as _CS_MACHINE_IDENT.
_CS_MACHINE_SERIAL
Machine serial number as found labeled on the external machine
chassis. The value will be a printable ascii string. This string is not
available on all classes of machines; if unavailable, the string will be
empty. This string is not a unique identifier of the machine, since
machines of different classes can have the same serial number.
If a unique identifier is needed, use _CS_MACHINE_IDENT or
_CS_PARTITION_IDENT.
The preferred method of calling these functions is defined in the confstr (3C) manpage as
the following:
bufsize=confstr(_CS_MACHINE_IDENT,NULL,(size_t)0);
buffer=(char *)malloc(bufsize+1);
confstr(_CS_MACHINE_IDENT,buffer,bufsize+1);
The first line will return the length of the string to be returned, allocate memory based
on this value, and then call confstr() again to get the actual value.