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Introduction

The ECLiPSe system has been developed under the UNIX operating system. The interface to the file system, process communication and environment are closely related to the corresponding UNIX facilities. Unfortunately a few features are only available on UNIXes of the Berkeley family, not on System-V. However they were considered useful enough not to leave them out for portability reasons. Some features are therefore not supported on some System-V versions. Since there is a trend to unify the different UNIXes, these incompatibilities will hopefully disappear in the future.

ECLiPSe's operating system interface consists of a collection of built-in predicates and some global flags that are accessed with set_flag/2, get_flag/2 and env/0. They are described in the following sections.




1999-08-06