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What is the environment variable HZ=100?

Your system would have an on-board timer, that ticks at a certain rate generating clock interrupts (ticks) per second. This rate is typically 100. HZ is a system variable denoting this rate.

You can look at <sys/param.h> and find the following on a Solaris system:

... #define HZ ((int)_sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK)) #define TICK (1000000000/(int)_sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK))) ...

Thus, you can write a small piece of code that uses sysconf to get the value of HZ. Here's something that does the job:

#include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sys/param.h> int main() { long hz = 0; if ((hz = sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK)) < 0) { perror("sysconf"); exit(1); } printf("HZ = %ld\n", hz); exit(0); }