Reliably detect Windows in Python

Question

I\'m working on a couple of Linux tools and need to prevent installation on Windows, since it depends on FHS and is thus rendered useless on that platform. The platfor

Answer 1

For those that came here looking for a way to detect Cygwin from Python (as opposed to just detecting Windows), here are some example return values from os.name and platform.system on different platforms

OS/build     | os.name | platform.system() 
-------------+---------+-----------------------
Win32 native | nt      | Windows
Win32 cygwin | posix   | CYGWIN_NT-5.1*
Win64 native | nt      | Windows
Win64 cygwin | posix   | CYGWIN_NT-6.1-WOW64*
Linux        | posix   | Linux

From this point, how to distinguish between Windows native and Cygwin should be obvious although I'm not convinced this is future proof.

* version numbers are for XP and Win7 respectively, do not rely on them