detecting operating system in R (e.g. for adaptive .Rprofile files)

Question

I was wondering how to automatically detect operating system in R, for example to place things in the .Rprofile.

Answer 1

I'm not sure about using Sys.info() since the help page says it is not implemented on all R platforms; maybe use .Platform instead? ?.Platform has a lot of useful information, since:

‘.Platform’ is a list with some details of the platform under which R was built. This provides means to write OS-portable R code.

It also seems the packages included with R use .Platform much more frequently than Sys.info.

josh: /c/R/R-2.12.0-src/src/library
> grep ".Platform" */R/* | wc -l
144
josh: /c/R/R-2.12.0-src/src/library
> grep ".Platform\$OS.type" */R/* | wc -l
99
josh: /c/R/R-2.12.0-src/src/library
> grep "Sys.info" */R/* | wc -l
4