How to detect Mac OS version using Python?

Question

My application is assumed to be running on a Mac OS X system. However, what I need to do is figure out what version of Mac OS (or Darwin) it is running on, preferably as a

Answer 1

>>> import platform
>>> platform.mac_ver()
('10.5.8', ('', '', ''), 'i386')

As you see, the first item of the tuple mac_ver returns is a string, not a number (hard to make '10.5.8' into a number!-), but it's pretty easy to manipulate the 10.x.y string into the kind of numbers you want. For example,

>>> v, _, _ = platform.mac_ver()
>>> v = float('.'.join(v.split('.')[:2]))
>>> print v
10.5

If you prefer the Darwin kernel version rather than the MacOSX version, that's also easy to access -- use the similarly-formatted string that's the third item of the tuple returned by platform.uname().