How do I check if I m running on Windows in Python

Question

I found the platform module but it says it returns  Windows  and it s returning  Microsoft  on my machine  I notice in another thread here on stackoverflow it returns  Vista  sometimes   So  the question is  how do implemement   if isWindows            In a forward compatible way  If I have to check for things like  Vista  then it will break when the next version of windows comes out     Note  The answers claiming this is a duplicate question do not actually answer the question isWindows  They answer the question  what platform   Since many flavors of windows exist none of them comprehensively describe how to get an answer of isWindows

User · Accepted Answer

Python os module

Specifically for Python 3.6/3.7:

os.name: The name of the operating system dependent module imported. The following names have currently been registered: 'posix', 'nt', 'java'.

In your case, you want to check for 'nt' as os.name output:

import os

if os.name == 'nt':
     ...

There is also a note on os.name:

See also sys.platform has a finer granularity. os.uname() gives system-dependent version information.

The platform module provides detailed checks for the system’s identity.

User · Answer

Are you using platform system     system           Returns the system OS name  e g   Linux    Windows  or  Java            An empty string is returned if the value cannot be determined    If that isn t working  maybe try platform win32 ver and if it doesn t raise an exception  you re on Windows  but I don t know if that s forward compatible to 64-bit  since it has 32 in the name    win32 ver release     version     csd     ptype             Get additional version information from the Windows Registry         and return a tuple  version csd ptype  referring to version         number  CSD level and OS type  multi single         processor     But os name is probably the way to go  as others have mentioned    For what it s worth  here s a few of the ways they check for Windows in platform py   if sys platform     win32    --------- if os environ get  OS          Windows NT    --------- try  import win32api  ---------   Emulation using  winreg  added in Python 2 0  and   sys getwindowsversion    added in Python 2 3  import  winreg GetVersionEx   sys getwindowsversion  ---------- def system             Returns the system OS name  e g   Linux    Windows  or  Java               An empty string is returned if the value cannot be determined                 return uname   0

User · Answer

import platform is windows   any platform win32 ver      or  import sys is windows   hasattr sys   getwindowsversion

User · Answer

You should be able to rely on os name   import os if os name     nt               edit  Now I d say the clearest way to do this is via the platform module  as per the other answer

User · Answer

in sys too   import sys   its win32  maybe there is win64 too  is windows   sys platform startswith  win

[python] How do I check if I'm running on Windows in Python?

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