Python: What OS am I running on?

Question

What do I need to look at to see whether I\'m on Windows or Unix, etc?

Answer 1

You can look at the code in pyOSinfo which is part of the pip-date package, to get the most relevant OS information, as seen from your Python distribution.

One of the most common reasons people want to check their OS is for terminal compatibility and if certain system commands are available. Unfortunately, the success of this checking is somewhat dependent on your python installation and OS. For example, uname is not available on most Windows python packages. The above python program will show you the output of the most commonly used built-in functions, already provided by os, sys, platform, site.

So the best way to get only the essential code is looking at that as an example. (I guess I could have just pasted it here, but that would not have been politically correct.)