Possible values from sys.platform?

What are the possible return values from the following command?

import sys
print sys.platform

I know there is a lot of possibilities, so I’m mainly interested in the “main” ones (Windows, Linux, Mac OS)

Answers:

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Method 1

┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
│ 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 Linux version is always linux2; after, it is linux.

Method 2

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

darwin

Linux (2.6 kernel):

linux2

Windows XP 32 bit:

win32

Versions in brackets have been checked – other/newer versions are likely to be the same.

Method 3

As others have indicated, sys.platform
is derived from the name that the
system vendor gives their system.
However, Python also adds
plat- to sys.path, so
you can look at all the plat-*
directories in the Python
distribution.

This gives you the 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 can have
additional values, when Python gets
compiled on a system for which no
platform-specific directory has been
created.

From here.

Method 4

FreeBSD 7.0: freebsd7. FreeBSD8 but build performed on previous version, same answer.

So be aware you get the platform used for the build, not necessarely the one you’re running on.

Method 5

As of Dec 29 2013, OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks is still labeled Darwin.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0