.Platform {base}

R Documentation

Platform Specific Variables

Description

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

Usage

.Platform

Value

A 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

R.version and Sys.info give more details about the OS. In particular, R.version$platform is the canonical name of the platform under which R was compiled.

.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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