How do i check/get the total amount of RAM, on a machine running UNIX?

It can depend on what flavor. Please post the "uname -a " output.

You can grep it out of the kernel. Or look in dmesg. If you have logging for dmesg to /var/adm/messages, you can grep it out of that ascii file. It should show your memory there. Grep for "memory" or "physical".

Here is what my output is from dmesg.

Memory Information:
physical page size = 4096 bytes, logical page size = 4096 bytes
Physical: 25165824 Kbytes, lockable: 20122908 Kbytes, available: 23098488 Kbytes

Hope this helps you!!

__________________
My brain is your brain

Thanx, that worked!

Try the memsize command (Unixware). There are some options, see the man page for the command.

Example:

# memsize -afm
1024 Total memory
1024 Usable memory
985 General memory
985 File (Pageable) memory
0 Dedicated memory

On Solaris you may try
prtconf|grep Mem