I'm fairly new to HP-UX, and I need to know how to identify the number of cores on a PA-8800 processor from the command line. Any help here would be appreciated.

All 8800's are dual core.

So run top and divide by two for the number of dual core processors you have.
Or there are other various fancy ways to do this etc
/etc/ioscan -k -C processor | grep processor | wc -l
There are easily 10 ways to find this out, and thousands of ways to format the info etc.
Best Regards,
Aaron

Dividing by two would indeed solve the problem -- right up until HP moved to quad-core, or introduced a technology similar to Hyper-Threading. And if I happen to be running on a single-core system with only one processor, suddenly my script is only detecting half a processor.

Nice try, but it isn't as simple as it looks at first glance.

Did you even try the ioscan command? It had nothing to do with the top comment.

ioscan does not seem to help. However I do notice that dualcore cpu's seem to have the same serial number if they are in the same chip. But there are several serial number fields and you need to get the right one. Try:

echo "scl q cpu;info;wait;infolog" | cstm | grep -E "CPU on path|^Serial Number"

Whoa, you lost me around "cstm". What version of HP-UX are you running? I can't even find a manpage to tell me what the command does.