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

Question

I have a shell script that is used both on Windows/Cygwin and Mac and Linux. It needs slightly different variables for each versions.

How can a shell/bash script de

Answer 1

Bash sets the shell variable OSTYPE. From man bash:

Automatically set to a string that describes the operating system on which bash is executing.

This has a tiny advantage over uname in that it doesn't require launching a new process, so will be quicker to execute.

However, I'm unable to find an authoritative list of expected values. For me on Ubuntu 14.04 it is set to 'linux-gnu'. I've scraped the web for some other values. Hence:

case "$OSTYPE" in
  linux*)   echo "Linux / WSL" ;;
  darwin*)  echo "Mac OS" ;; 
  win*)     echo "Windows" ;;
  msys*)    echo "MSYS / MinGW / Git Bash" ;;
  cygwin*)  echo "Cygwin" ;;
  bsd*)     echo "BSD" ;;
  solaris*) echo "Solaris" ;;
  *)        echo "unknown: $OSTYPE" ;;
esac

The asterisks are important in some instances - for example OSX appends an OS version number after the 'darwin'. The 'win' value is actually 'win32', I'm told - maybe there is a 'win64'?

Perhaps we could work together to populate a table of verified values here:

• Linux Ubuntu (incl. WSL): linux-gnu
• Cygwin 64-bit: cygwin
• Msys/MINGW (Git Bash for Windows): msys

(Please append your value if it differs from existing entries)