How can I detect the operating system in Perl?

Solution 1:

Examine the $^O variable which will contain the name of the operating system:

print "$^O\n";

Which prints linux on Linux and MSWin32 on Windows.

You can also refer to this variable by the name $OSNAME if you use the English module:

use English qw' -no_match_vars ';
print "$OSNAME\n";

According to perlport, $^O will be darwin on Mac OS X.

You can also use the Config core module, which can provide the same information (and a lot more):

use Config;

print "$Config{osname}\n";
print "$Config{archname}\n";

Which on my Ubuntu machine prints:

linux
i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi

Note that this information is based on the system that Perl was built, which is not necessarily the system Perl is currently running on (the same is true for $^O and $OSNAME); the OS won't likely be different but some information, like the architecture name, may very well be.

Solution 2:

If you need more specific information on Windows this may help.

my $osname = $^O;


if( $osname eq 'MSWin32' ){{
  eval { require Win32; } or last;
  $osname = Win32::GetOSName();

  # work around for historical reasons
  $osname = 'WinXP' if $osname =~ /^WinXP/;
}}

Derived from sysinfo.t, which I wrote the original version.

If you need more detailed information:

my ( $osvername, $major, $minor, $id ) = Win32::GetOSVersion();

Solution 3:

Sys::Info::OS looks like a relatively clean potential solution, but currently doesn't seem to support Mac. It shouldn't be too much work to add that though.