Detecting common posix OSs

My first thought was to use the environment variables in shell. That didn't work: zsh only provides $CPUTYPE, bash only provides $HOSTTYPE.

More portable way is to use uname:

case $(uname -m) in #
  i686)
    :
    ;;
  x86_64)
    :
    ;;
esac

case $(uname -s) in
  Linux)
    :
    ;;
  Darwin) # OSX
    :
    ;;
esac