Possible values ​​from sys.platform?

Question

What are the possible return values ​​from the following command?

import sys print sys.platform 

I know that there are many possibilities, so I am mainly interested in the "core" (Windows, Linux, Mac OS).

Answer 1

Mac OS X (10.4, 10.5, 10.7, 10.8):

 darwin 

Linux (kernel 2.6):

 linux2 

Windows XP 32 bit:

 win32 

The versions in parentheses have been checked - other / newer versions are likely to be the same.

Answer 2

 ┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑ │ System │ Value │ ┝━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┿━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┥ │ Linux │ linux or linux2 (*) │ │ Windows │ win32 │ │ Windows/Cygwin │ cygwin │ │ Windows/MSYS2 │ msys │ │ Mac OS X │ darwin │ │ OS/2 │ os2 │ │ OS/2 EMX │ os2emx │ │ RiscOS │ riscos │ │ AtheOS │ atheos │ │ FreeBSD 7 │ freebsd7 │ │ FreeBSD 8 │ freebsd8 │ │ FreeBSD N │ freebsdN │ │ OpenBSD 6 │ openbsd6 │ ┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙ 

(*) Prior to Python 3.3, the value for any version of Linux was always linux2 ; after that is linux .

Answer 3

As others have pointed out, sys.platform comes from the name that the System Provider gives its system to. However, Python also adds plat- to sys.path, so you can look at all the plat- * directories in the Python distribution.

It gives you a list

aix3 aix4 atheos beos5 darwin freebsd2 freebsd3 freebsd4 freebsd5 freebsd6 freebsd7 generic irix5 irix6 linux2 mac netbsd1 next3 os2emx riscos sunos5 unixware7

Of course, sys.platform may have additional meanings when Python gets compiled on a system for which no directory for a particular platform has been created.

From here .

Answer 4

FreeBSD 7.0: freebsd7 . FreeBSD8, but the build was done in the previous version, the same answer.

Know that you are getting the platform used to build, not just the one you are working on.

Answer 5

As of December 29, 2013, OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks is still tagged with Darwin.