How do I programmatically determine operating system in Java?

Question

I would like to determine the operating system of the host that my Java program is running programmatically (for example: I would like to be able to load different propertie

Answer 1

some of the links in the answers above seem to be broken. I have added pointers to current source code in the code below and offer an approach for handling the check with an enum as an answer so that a switch statement can be used when evaluating the result:

OsCheck.OSType ostype=OsCheck.getOperatingSystemType();
switch (ostype) {
    case Windows: break;
    case MacOS: break;
    case Linux: break;
    case Other: break;
}

The helper class is:

/**
 * helper class to check the operating system this Java VM runs in
 *
 * please keep the notes below as a pseudo-license
 *
 * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/228477/how-do-i-programmatically-determine-operating-system-in-java
 * compare to http://svn.terracotta.org/svn/tc/dso/tags/2.6.4/code/base/common/src/com/tc/util/runtime/Os.java
 * http://www.docjar.com/html/api/org/apache/commons/lang/SystemUtils.java.html
 */
import java.util.Locale;
public static final class OsCheck {
  /**
   * types of Operating Systems
   */
  public enum OSType {
    Windows, MacOS, Linux, Other
  };

  // cached result of OS detection
  protected static OSType detectedOS;

  /**
   * detect the operating system from the os.name System property and cache
   * the result
   * 
   * @returns - the operating system detected
   */
  public static OSType getOperatingSystemType() {
    if (detectedOS == null) {
      String OS = System.getProperty("os.name", "generic").toLowerCase(Locale.ENGLISH);
      if ((OS.indexOf("mac") >= 0) || (OS.indexOf("darwin") >= 0)) {
        detectedOS = OSType.MacOS;
      } else if (OS.indexOf("win") >= 0) {
        detectedOS = OSType.Windows;
      } else if (OS.indexOf("nux") >= 0) {
        detectedOS = OSType.Linux;
      } else {
        detectedOS = OSType.Other;
      }
    }
    return detectedOS;
  }
}