Proposed OS Utilities

This page collects proposed extension steps. Implementation welcome, but contents subject to change at any time.

These steps are in the “proposed OS extension namespace”, http://exproc.org/proposed/steps/os, identified by the prefix “pos”.

pos:info

Returns information about the operating system.

<p:declare-step type="pos:info">
<p:output port="result"/>
</p:declare-step>

The pos:info step returns information about the operating system on which the processor is running. It returns a c:result element with attributes describing properties of the system. It should include the following properties:

file-separator: The file separator; usually “/” on Unix, “\” on Windows.
path-separator: The path separator; usually “:” on Unix, “;” on Windows.
os-architecture: The operating system architecture, for example “i386”.
os-name: The name of the operating system, for example “Mac OS X”.
os-version: The version of the operating system, for example “10.5.6”.
cwd: The current working directory.
user-name: The login name of the effective user, for example “ndw”.
user-home: The home diretory of the effective user, for example “/home/ndw”.

The exact set of properties returned is implementation-dependent.

pos:cwd

Returns the current working directory of the processor.

<p:declare-step type="pos:cwd">
<p:output port="result" sequence="true"/>
</p:declare-step>

The pos:cwd step returns a single c:result containing the current working directory. On systems which have no concept of a working directory, this step returns the empty sequence.

(This step is exactly duplicates the cwd attribute on the c:result from pos:info; it's just for convenience.)

pos:env

Returns information about the environment

<p:declare-step type="pos:env">
<p:output port="result"/>
</p:declare-step>

The pos:env step returns information about the operating system environment. It returns a c:result containing zero or more c:env elements. Each c:env has name and value attributes containing the name and value of an environment variable.

On systems which nave no concept of an environment, this step returns an empty c:result.