Determine Os from a Single Command Line Operation

Determine OS from a single command line operation

If I understood your problem correctly, then uname is the ideal command. If it's any Unix-system (including OSX), it'll return the correct variable, and if it's Windows it'll return command not found or similar.

Command which will succeed on both windows and linux, but gives a different result

I still think echo "$PATH" is the right idea here if you can base your decision on the output.

Since with a shell (bash, tcsh, ksh, etc.) on linux and cmd.exe or powershell on Windows you will get very different results.

With a linux/etc. shell you will get a path string.

With cmd.exe you will get "$PATH".

And with powershell you will get the empty string.

That empty string result is technically valid for linux/etc. since you can have an empty path there but you can work around that by using "${PATH:-linux}" instead which, for an empty (or unset) $PATH variable on in a sh-derived shell will get you linux and will still get you an empty string from powershell (though this fails for a csh derived shell it seems).

Determine the OS version, Linux and Windows from Powershell

Aren't there environment variables you can view on the other platforms for the OS?

Get-ChildItem -Path Env:

Particularly, on Windows at least, there's an OS environment variable, so you should be able to accomplish this by using $Env:OS.

---

Since some time has passed and the PowerShell Core (v6) product is GA now (the Core branding has been dropped as of v7), you can more accurately determine your platform based on the following automatic boolean variables:

$IsMacOS
$IsLinux
$IsWindows

How to check if running in Cygwin, Mac or Linux?

Usually, uname with its various options will tell you what environment you're running in:

pax> uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 IBM-L3F3936 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin

pax> uname -s
CYGWIN_NT-5.1

And, according to the very helpful schot (in the comments), uname -s gives Darwin for OSX and Linux for Linux, while my Cygwin gives CYGWIN_NT-5.1. But you may have to experiment with all sorts of different versions.

So the bash code to do such a check would be along the lines of:

unameOut="$(uname -s)"
case "${unameOut}" in
    Linux*)     machine=Linux;;
    Darwin*)    machine=Mac;;
    CYGWIN*)    machine=Cygwin;;
    MINGW*)     machine=MinGw;;
    *)          machine="UNKNOWN:${unameOut}"
esac
echo ${machine}

---

Note that I'm assuming here that you're actually running within CygWin (the bash shell of it) so paths should already be correctly set up. As one commenter notes, you can run the bash program, passing the script, from cmd itself and this may result in the paths not being set up as needed.

If you are doing that, it's your responsibility to ensure the correct executables (i.e., the CygWin ones) are being called, possibly by modifying the path beforehand or fully specifying the executable locations (e.g., /c/cygwin/bin/uname).

How to detect the OS from a Bash script?

I think the following should work. I'm not sure about win32 though.

if [[ "$OSTYPE" == "linux-gnu"* ]]; then
        # ...
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "darwin"* ]]; then
        # Mac OSX
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "cygwin" ]]; then
        # POSIX compatibility layer and Linux environment emulation for Windows
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "msys" ]]; then
        # Lightweight shell and GNU utilities compiled for Windows (part of MinGW)
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "win32" ]]; then
        # I'm not sure this can happen.
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "freebsd"* ]]; then
        # ...
else
        # Unknown.
fi

OS detecting makefile

There are many good answers here already, but I wanted to share a more complete example that both:

• doesn't assume uname exists on Windows
• also detects the processor

The CCFLAGS defined here aren't necessarily recommended or ideal; they're just what the project to which I was adding OS/CPU auto-detection happened to be using.

ifeq ($(OS),Windows_NT)
    CCFLAGS += -D WIN32
    ifeq ($(PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432),AMD64)
        CCFLAGS += -D AMD64
    else
        ifeq ($(PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE),AMD64)
            CCFLAGS += -D AMD64
        endif
        ifeq ($(PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE),x86)
            CCFLAGS += -D IA32
        endif
    endif
else
    UNAME_S := $(shell uname -s)
    ifeq ($(UNAME_S),Linux)
        CCFLAGS += -D LINUX
    endif
    ifeq ($(UNAME_S),Darwin)
        CCFLAGS += -D OSX
    endif
    UNAME_P := $(shell uname -p)
    ifeq ($(UNAME_P),x86_64)
        CCFLAGS += -D AMD64
    endif
    ifneq ($(filter %86,$(UNAME_P)),)
        CCFLAGS += -D IA32
    endif
    ifneq ($(filter arm%,$(UNAME_P)),)
        CCFLAGS += -D ARM
    endif
endif

Get Windows version in a batch file

Have you tried using the wmic commands?

Try
wmic os get version

This will give you the version number in a command line, then you just need to integrate into the batch file.

---

Related Topics