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I have a program that connects to a remote machine via SSH. I want to upload and run a binary on that machine. In order to do that I need to know what OS it is (I will support Linux, Mac and probably Windows), and what CPU architecture (I will probably only support x86_64, but it would be good to be able to detect others and print a sensible error, if this is possible).

It doesn't look like the SSH protocol itself provides any of this information. Is there a simple, ROBUST way to do this? With as few hacks as possible (no hairy Bash scripts!).

The best thing I can think of is to try running uname -s -m, and whatever the Windows equivalent is and parse the results.

Timmmm
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The SSH protocol doesn't provide any information about the remote system except its protocol version. However, oftentimes vendors will include a string in the protocol string. For example, if you do nc gitlab.com 22 </dev/null | head -n 1, you can tell that GitLab runs Ubuntu.

However, not all remote systems provide this information, so for a reliable test, you'll probably need to log into the system. As mentioned, you can run uname on Unix systems, and cmd /c ver on Windows systems to find out what OS you're on. Note that the latter will not work on Windows if you log into a MinGW-based bash on Windows, since the /c will be rewritten as C:\; you'll need to double the slash or use uname there.

I'm not aware of a single command that you can invoke that will work on all systems, so you'll probably have to make multiple shell requests. You are probably better off doing this using an SSH library, since the OpenSSH binary will print any banner from the remote side whether you want it or not, and that can be confused with the output you get from the remote side.

bk2204
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