From: Peter <Peter.Vanbroekhoven@...>
Date: 2003-09-27T01:47:56+09:00
Subject: Re: TCPSocket.gethostbyname difficulties

>   How do I get the full name of the machine that I am on?
>   My current method involves ifconfig -a to get the IP and
>   nslookup to get the name.
> 
>   Is there a ruby -e one liner to do this?
> 
>   (Please forgive me if this is a stupid question.)

ruby -e "require 'socket'; puts Socket.gethostbyname(Socket.gethostname)[0]"

The extra Socket.gethostbyname(...)[0] is necessary because
Socket.gethostname does not (necessarily) give the full hostname. Also if
your hostname is listed in your /etc/hosts (or the equivalent under
windows) as localhost, Socket#gethostbyname still returns the simple
hostname and localhost as alias (Socket.gethostbyname(...)[1] gives the
list of aliases). This happened on one machine I tested it on...

Peter