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Date:      Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:06:23 +1300 (NZDT)
From:      Atom Smasher <atom@smasher.org>
To:        Andrew Thompson <thompsa@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD-Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: kenv - output needed
Message-ID:  <1003240736570.40436@smasher>
In-Reply-To: <20100323180354.GD45454@citylink.fud.org.nz>
References:  <1003231706140.40436@smasher> <20100323180354.GD45454@citylink.fud.org.nz>

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On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Andrew Thompson wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 05:12:47PM +1300, Atom Smasher wrote:
>> i'm trying to figure out what might be reasonable output from kenv. on 
>> the three machines that i have access to i'm already seeing wide 
>> variations of formatting and usefulness.
>>
>> i'd like to collect as much output as i can get (off-list should be 
>> fine) from one of these two commands:
>>
>> 1) preferred:
>> 	kenv | egrep bios
>>
>> 2) i can also use this:
>> 	kenv | egrep 'product|maker'
>
> kenv is essentially dumping all the variables set by the bootloader 
> prior to starting the kernel. If you want something more structured then 
> maybe the dmidecode utility would be useful.
===============

structure is cool, but it seems like you're being human-centric in your 
reference to structure; i actually want to parse the info with a script, 
making kenv preferable.

i want the ability to run the script without any privileges; again making 
kenv preferable.

so with an unprivileged script, i'm leaning towards kenv to find out what 
hardware is running (motherboard & system info, eg "Dell Inc., 0H603H, 
PowerEdge 2950" or "Acer, Navarro, Aspire 5100").

other than being formatted more nicely (for humans, anyway) and only 
running with root privileges, is there any ~real~ difference between the 
information i would get from dmidecode rather than kenv (as it relates to 
motherboard & system make & model)? it seems like in either case, i'm just 
getting the info from smbios... and that info could be good, bad or ugly 
regardless of how it's formatted.


-- 
         ...atom

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