Modules that provide os-specific behaviors often need to know if the current operating system matches a more generic type of operating systems. for example, 'linux' is a type of 'unix' operating system and so is 'freebsd'.

perl::ostype provides a mapping between an operating system name as given by $^o and a more generic type. the initial version is based on the os type mappings provided in module::build and extutils::cbuilder. (thus, microsoft operating systems are given the type 'windows' rather than 'win32'.)