Question

I was wondering how you could detect what platform a program is running on, I have an application and need it to go to a certain folder depending on whether it is on a Linux or Mac machine.

Thanks!

Answer 1

It may break in the future, but for now, you can play on a large number of filesystem differences between both.

• /Applications, /Developer, /Library and others are mac-specific. If you have them, it looks like a mac.
• /proc, /home, /srv and others are linux-specific. If they are there, it looks like a linux machine. See full list.

If you combine several of these path-checking tricks into a function, you can insulate yourself against any one of the tricks failing independently of the others.

You can check for folder existence by using stat.

struct stat st;
if(stat("/proc",&st) == 0) {
    printf(" /proc is present: this may be Linux\n");
}