HP-UX 11i Release Notes (December 2000)

Programming
Changes to confstr(3C) (new)
Chapter 13268
Changes to confstr(3C) (new)
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:
bufsize=confstr(_CS_MACHINE_IDENT,NULL,(size_t)0);