Re: OS X (or other OS's): how to get a fully-qualified domain name?

[John Owens <john_owens@yahoo.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> > This does bring up the larger point, however, that there might be
> > circumstances where emacs DOES need to know its fully qualified
> > domain name, and there does not seem to be a way to get it,
> > which is unfortunate.
> 
> But this is *very* rare.  And for good reasons: it's not really clear what
> it means.  A machine can have:
> - no fully qualified name (if you're not connected to the net).
> - 1 FQDN
> - several different FQDN (using only one IP address or using several IP
>   addresses via a single network interface, or over several network
>   interfaces, ...).

Understood; first, I can't think of a circumstance where emacs might
*really* need to know this. But in case it did, it would be nice if it would
at least make a best effort. If it has none, well, it fails. If it has one or
more, it returns one valid one. I'm just thinking as a programmer, if I
wanted to use a FQDN name, having emacs at least make a good effort
toward finding one would be desirable. And in OS X's case, it isn't
making a particularly good effort.

None of this makes any difference for the problem I'm looking at; the
suggestion to just use the work hostname and to hardcode it will work
just fine for what I want. I'm more interested (at this point) in "what
should system-name return in the ideal case"; for me, a best-effort
toward a FQDN would be desirable.

JDO