Platform {base}R Documentation

Platform Specific Variables

Description

.Platform is a list with functions and variables as components. This provides means to write OS portable R code.

Usage

.Platform
Platform()

Details

Currently, .Platform <- Platform() when R starts up.

Value

.Platform is list with at least the following components:

OS.type character, giving the Operating System (family) of the computer. One of the following values is returned: "unix", "mac", or "windows" (in historical order).
file.sep character, giving the file separator, used on your platform, e.g., "/" on Unix alikes.
dynlib.ext character, giving the file name extension of dynamically loadable libraries, e.g., ".dll" on Windows.
GUI character, giving the type of GUI in use, or "unknown" if no GUI can be assumed.
endian character, "big" or "little", giving the endianness of the processor in use.

See Also

machine for another view of the OS, Sys.info which gives more details about the OS, .Machine for details of the arithmetic used, and system for invoking platform-specific system commands.

Examples

## Note: this can be done in a system-independent way by file.info()$isdir
if(.Platform$OS.type == "unix") {
   system.test <- function(...) { system(paste("test", ...)) == 0 }
   dir.exists <- function(dir) sapply(dir, function(d)system.test("-d", d))
   dir.exists(c(R.home(), "/tmp", "~", "/NO"))# > T T T F
}

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