Uname or hostname?

[sawyl]

Hostname, obviously. According to the docs, hostname "returns the standard host name for the current machine", whereas uname returns "name of this node within an implementation-dependent communications network", whatever that is.

Comments

[vincel.livejournal.com]

No, hostname is bad, because if run as root there's the danger you can inadvertently change the hostname. I once saw a bug in an IRIX script which resulted in the hostname changing to "-s".

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Ok, fair point. Hostname can be risky if you're messing around as root, but at least it always provides consistent information. Uname on the other hand is worryingly fragile and in some cases oddly non-standard.

I seem to remember that uname under Unicos behaves strangely, producing non-standard output and using different options to everyone else in the Unix universe, but at least the stuff it dumps out is consistent. Other super trad versions of unix use a fixed 8 character string hardwired at compile time, so if you build the kernel on one host and copy out to the rest (as recommended by the docs), the nodename is almost always incorrect.