Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

As far as I know, Python has 3 ways of finding out what operating system is running on: os.name sys.platform platform.system() Knowing this information is often useful in conditional imports, or using functionality that differs between platforms (e.g. time.clock() on Windows v.s. time.time() on UNIX). My question is, why 3 different ways of doing this? When should one way be used and not another? Which way is the 'best' (most future-proof or least likely to accidentally exclude a particular system which your program can actually run on)? It seems like sys.platform is more specific than os.name , allowing you to distinguish win32 from cygwin (as opposed to just nt ), and linux2 from darwin (as opposed to just posix ). But if that's so, that what about the difference between sys.platform and platform.system() ? For example, which is better, this: import sys if sys.platform == 'linux2': # Do Linux-specific stuff or this? : import platform if platform.system() == 'Linux': # Do Linux-specific stuff For now I'll be sticking to sys.platform , so this question isn't particularly urgent, but I would be very grateful for some clarification regarding this.

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel