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| author | Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> | 2011-07-09 13:48:29 (GMT) |
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| committer | Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> | 2011-07-09 13:48:29 (GMT) |
| commit | ea901ad2c6207f44bf1f5b99abfaf349e0ca2145 (patch) | |
| tree | 72c2b21fe6058effe6fb0c238e347609559a90c9 /Doc/library/sys.rst | |
| parent | 4a4a0fed0797b641d2a980cc1b8ef4c77bbae9b5 (diff) | |
| download | cpython-ea901ad2c6207f44bf1f5b99abfaf349e0ca2145.zip cpython-ea901ad2c6207f44bf1f5b99abfaf349e0ca2145.tar.gz cpython-ea901ad2c6207f44bf1f5b99abfaf349e0ca2145.tar.bz2 | |
Issue #12326: document the recommended idiom for checking sys.platform on Unix systems.
Also, point to the various alternatives.
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/library/sys.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/library/sys.rst | 12 |
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/library/sys.rst b/Doc/library/sys.rst index 305d477..32ec03d 100644 --- a/Doc/library/sys.rst +++ b/Doc/library/sys.rst @@ -726,6 +726,12 @@ always available. For Unix systems, this is the lowercased OS name as returned by ``uname -s`` with the first part of the version as returned by ``uname -r`` appended, e.g. ``'sunos5'`` or ``'linux2'``, *at the time when Python was built*. + Unless you want to test for a specific system version, it is therefore + recommended to use the following idiom:: + + if sys.platform.startswith('linux'): + # Linux-specific code here... + For other systems, the values are: ================ =========================== @@ -740,6 +746,12 @@ always available. AtheOS ``'atheos'`` ================ =========================== + .. seealso:: + :attr:`os.name` has a coarser granularity. :func:`os.uname` gives + system-dependent version information. + + The :mod:`platform` module provides detailed checks for the + system's identity. .. data:: prefix |