[Python-Dev] Recommended way to tell platform (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 20:35:25 CEST 2004

[Guido]

This does bring up an interesting question: what's the recommended way to distinguish a certain platform? There's os.name, sys.platform, the platform module, and I've also seen code testing for os.sep=='/'.

I ask myself that question every time I need to do it. Out of sheer momentum now, I almost always use

if sys.platform in ('win32',):

I dislike using os.name == 'nt', mostly because if we asked all Windows Python users which OS they use, only a tiny percentage would answer "NT". Since NT is a dying OS, 'nt' is an increasingly odd-looking thing to test agaist.

OTOH, I have no idea when or why sys.platform == "win32" would give a different result than os.name == "nt".

I still prefer hasattr(, ) whenever applicable, e.g. preferring hasattr(os, 'fork') over os.name=='posix' (or os.name!='nt' :-), but sometimes that's not possible.

Like whether to use time.time or time.clock.

What should be the preferred way? (It may be impossible to say because there are different use cases, but probably one of the most important cases is simply distinguishing Windows from the rest -- how should that be done?)

My way -- unless it's broken in some way I haven't bumped into yet.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list