API to get the user's OS and OS version

[Amitabh Arya]

Hi,

       Is there any APIs, which can tell user's system Operating system and it's version and other information about system. I checked the os package, but didn't find one.

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

No, nothing like that is in the standard library.

[Amitabh Arya]

Any ways to figure out the user's current system. So that you can defined path or write/read files on particular path.

Thanks,
Amitabh Arya

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Oh, if all you need is the current OS, there's runtime.GOOS, which is "linux", "darwin", "windows", etc.

But that doesn't tell you the OS version.

[Hotei]

You can check all the system's variables using  os pkg.  The standard environment may have something useful but is not guaranteed. HOWEVER -  if you can control what gets put in the users environment then this might work. The Go team has gradually reduced how much stuff is required to be manually entered in the environment but a few years ago it was a bit more.  Updating environment info is no fun from the "user support" side, but for a small group in a stable situation it might work.

see http://tip.golang.org/pkg/os/#Environ

[Amitabh Arya]

I think,  GOOS  only provide the set environment variable, nothing else. So if I have installed go on my system. Then yes it will work fine. But any other user, who does not have "Go lang" installed, this will not work on his system. Ass GOOS is from runtime pkg.

Correct me if I am wrong please.

Thanks,
Amitabh Arya

[Amitabh Arya]

Thanks for your reply Hotei :). But no I tried  os.Environ() before posting this post. It mainly give you the all set variable in environment. Just path nothing information about OS. :(
Correct me if I am wrong. 


Thanks,
Amitabh Arya

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Amitabh Arya <amitab...@gmail.com> writes:

> I think, GOOS only provide the set environment variable, nothing else. So
> if I have installed go on my system. Then yes it will work fine. But any
> other user, who does not have "Go lang" installed, this will not work on
> his system. Ass GOOS is from runtime pkg.

runtime.GOOS is the operating system for which the Go compiler and
packages were built. It's affected by the environment variable you use
when you build Go, but it's not affected by the environment when the Go
program is run.

Ian

[brainman]

On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:55:12 AM UTC+11, Amitabh Arya wrote:

Correct me if I am wrong please.

As Brad said, runtime.GOOS global variable will hold your answer. If it has "linux", then your program is running on Linux, "windows" - Windows, and so on. This will tell you your OS name. If you need more, like "version", you need to be more specific. There is no single definition of "os version", these varies between different OS. For example, I use Windows, so I would use something like that:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "syscall"
)

func main() {
    dll := syscall.MustLoadDLL("kernel32.dll")
    p := dll.MustFindProc("GetVersion")
    v, _, _ := p.Call()
    fmt.Printf("Windows version %d.%d (Build %d)\n", byte(v), uint8(v>>8), uint16(v>>16))
}

If I am running on Linux, I would look inside /proc/version file, or, perhaps, run "uname -a" program and parse its output.

Alex

[Hotei]

If you have the ability to set GOPATH, use the same method to set WINVER="Win7" (for windows 7) or WINVER="XP" or whatever is appropriate.   Then you can inspect it in your go program with Version := os.Getenv("WINVER")  and then

 if  Version == "Win7" {... } 

It's a pain to set up if you have a lot of users, but it will definitely work.  You can put any OS info you need in there, as long as you use unique ENV variable names you should have no problems.

[Graham Anderson]

Alternatives for these might be:

Windows: systeminfo | findstr /C:"OS"

Should print some additional info in addition to Alex' dll call.

Linux: lsb_release -a

Should print Distro name, distro version, arch, and baseline capabilities as
per LSB (but not kernel version as per uname -a)

[Amitabh Arya]

Yeah, but for systemInfo and Fll call. Application should know the platform, windows or Linux. As dll and systemInfo both does not work on Linux.

And the question is, how can we get the os platform.

--

Thanks,
Amitabh Arya

[Benny Siegert]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 13:28, Amitabh Arya <amitab...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, but for systemInfo and Fll call. Application should know the platform,
> windows or Linux. As dll and systemInfo both does not work on Linux.
>
> And the question is, how can we get the os platform.

switch runtime.GOOS {
case "windows": // ...
case "linux": // ...
case "freebsd": // ...
}

--Benny.

--
The first essential in chemistry is that you should perform practical
work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work
nor makes experiments will never attain the least degree of mastery.
        -- Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan (721-815)

[Graham Anderson]

On Tuesday 20 Mar 2012 08:28:36 Amitabh Arya wrote:
> And the question is, how can we get the os platform.

The binary will either be PE, ELF or Mach format.