How to check if running in Cygwin, Mac or Linux?

by

Usually, uname with its various options will tell you what environment you’re running in:

pax> uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 IBM-L3F3936 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin

pax> uname -s
CYGWIN_NT-5.1

And, according to the very helpful schot (in the comments), uname -s gives Darwin for OSX and Linux for Linux, while my Cygwin gives CYGWIN_NT-5.1. But you may have to experiment with all sorts of different versions.

So the bash code to do such a check would be along the lines of:

unameOut="$(uname -s)"
case "${unameOut}" in
    Linux*)     machine=Linux;;
    Darwin*)    machine=Mac;;
    CYGWIN*)    machine=Cygwin;;
    MINGW*)     machine=MinGw;;
    *)          machine="UNKNOWN:${unameOut}"
esac
echo ${machine}

Note that I’m assuming here that you’re actually running within CygWin (the bash shell of it) so paths should already be correctly set up. As one commenter notes, you can run the bash program, passing the script, from cmd itself and this may result in the paths not being set up as needed.

If you are doing that, it’s your responsibility to ensure the correct executables (i.e., the CygWin ones) are being called, possibly by modifying the path beforehand or fully specifying the executable locations (e.g., /c/cygwin/bin/uname).

More Related Contents:

  1. ‘\r’: command not found – .bashrc / .bash_profile [duplicate]
  2. what exactly env command do? [duplicate]
  3. Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of a shell script is running at a time
  4. What is the purpose of the : (colon) GNU Bash builtin?
  5. How to store standard error in a variable
  6. Multi-dimensional arrays in Bash
  7. How do I check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script?
  8. Capture stdout and stderr into different variables
  9. Checking from shell script if a directory contains files
  10. How to determine the current interactive shell that I’m in (command-line)
  11. Associative arrays in Shell scripts
  12. How to get the part of a file after the first line that matches a regular expression
  13. Trying to split a string into two variables
  14. Escape dollar sign in string by shell script
  15. Open and write data to text file using Bash?
  16. Command line to delete all ClearCase view-private files
  17. What’s a concise way to check that environment variables are set in a Unix shell script?
  18. Source files in a bash script
  19. executing shell command in background from script [duplicate]
  20. Use sed to replace all backslashes with forward slashes
  21. Waiting for background processes to finish before exiting script
  22. Variables as commands in Bash scripts
  23. How to split a file into equal parts, without breaking individual lines? [duplicate]
  24. Why does “local” discard the return code of a command?
  25. What does “<
  26. Assign a makefile variable value to a bash command result?
  27. Comparing PHP version numbers using Bash?
  28. run bash command in new shell and stay in new shell after this command executes
  29. How to properly nest Bash backticks
  30. Subtract two variables in Bash

Leave a Comment