When to use os.name, sys.platform, or platform.system?

Question

As far as I know, Python has 3 ways of finding out what operating system is running on:

1. os.name
2. sys.platform

Answer 1

It depends on whether you prefer raising exception or trying anything on an untested system and whether your code is so high level or so low level that it can or can't work on a similar untested system (e.g. untested Mac - 'posix' or on embedded ARM systems). More pythonic is to not enumerate all known systems but to test possible relevant properties. (e.g. it is considered important the endianess of the system but unimportant multiprocessing properties.)

• os.name is a sufficient resolution for the correct usage of os module. Possible values are 'posix', 'nt', 'os2', 'ce', 'java' or 'riscos' in Python 2.7, while only the 'posix', 'nt' and 'java' are used since Python 3.4.

• sys.platform is a finer resolution. It is recommended to use if sys.platform.startswith('linux') idiom because "linux2" means a Linux kernel version 2.xx or 3. Older kernels are currently never used. In Python 3.3 are all Linux systems simple 'linux'.

I do not know the specifics of "Mac" and "Java" systems and so I can not use the results of very good method platform.system() for branching, but I would use advantages of the platform module for messages and error logging.