CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncross-platform
dbr
dbr

Reputation: 169763

Possible values from sys.platform?

What are the possible return values from the following command?

import sys
print sys.platform

I know there is a lot of possibilities, so I'm mainly interested in the "main" ones (Windows, Linux, Mac OS)

Upvotes: 111

Views: 62191

Answers (5)

ICB
ICB

Reputation: 2139

┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
│ System              │ Value               │
┝━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┥
│ Linux               │ linux or linux2 (*) │
│ Windows             │ win32               │
│ Windows/Cygwin      │ cygwin              │
│ Windows/MSYS2       │ msys                │
│ Mac OS X            │ darwin              │
│ OS/2                │ os2                 │
│ OS/2 EMX            │ os2emx              │
│ RiscOS              │ riscos              │
│ AtheOS              │ atheos              │
│ FreeBSD 7           │ freebsd7            │
│ FreeBSD 8           │ freebsd8            │
│ FreeBSD N           │ freebsdN            │
│ OpenBSD 6           │ openbsd6            │
│ AIX                 │ aix (**)            │
┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙

(*) Prior to Python 3.3, the value for any Linux version is always linux2; after, it is linux.

(**) Prior Python 3.8 could also be aix5 or aix7; use sys.platform.startswith()

Upvotes: 213

Mitch Wheat
Mitch Wheat

Reputation: 300837

As others have indicated, sys.platform is derived from the name that the system vendor gives their system. However, Python also adds plat- to sys.path, so you can look at all the plat-* directories in the Python distribution.

This gives you the list

aix3 aix4 atheos beos5 darwin freebsd2 freebsd3 freebsd4 freebsd5 freebsd6 freebsd7 generic irix5 irix6 linux2 mac netbsd1 next3 os2emx riscos sunos5 unixware7

Of course, sys.platform can have additional values, when Python gets compiled on a system for which no platform-specific directory has been created.

From here.

Upvotes: 22

Jason Elwood
Jason Elwood

Reputation: 1335

As of Dec 29 2013, OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks is still labeled Darwin.

Upvotes: 1

dbr
dbr

Reputation: 169763

Mac OS X (10.4, 10.5, 10.7, 10.8):

darwin

Linux (2.6 kernel):

linux2

Windows XP 32 bit:

win32

Versions in brackets have been checked - other/newer versions are likely to be the same.

Upvotes: 39

Keltia
Keltia

Reputation: 14753

FreeBSD 7.0: freebsd7. FreeBSD8 but build performed on previous version, same answer.

So be aware you get the platform used for the build, not necessarely the one you're running on.

Upvotes: 9

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