This help topic is for R version 2.9.0. For the current version of R, try https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/Platform.html
.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 string, giving the Operating System (family) of the computer. One of "unix" or "windows".

file.sep

character string, giving the file separator used on your platform: "/" on both Unix-alikes and on Windows (but not on the once port to Classic Mac OS).

dynlib.ext

character string, giving the file name extension of dynamically loadable libraries, e.g., ".dll" on Windows and ".so" or ".sl" on Unix-alikes. (Note for Mac OS X users: these are shared objects as loaded by dyn.load and not dylibs: see dyn.load.)

GUI

character string, giving the type of GUI in use, or "unknown" if no GUI can be assumed. Possible values are for Unix-alikes the values given via the -g command-line flag ("X11", "Tk", "GNOME"), "AQUA" (running under R.app on Mac OS X), "Rgui" and "RTerm" (Windows) and perhaps others under alternative front-ends or embedded R.

endian

character string, "big" or "little", giving the endianness of the processor in use. This is relevant when it is necessary to know the order to read/write bytes of e.g. an integer or double from/to a connection: see readBin.

pkgType

character string, the preferred setting for options("pkgType"). Values "source", "mac.binary" and "win.binary" are currently in use.

path.sep

character string, giving the path separator, used on your platform, e.g., ":" on Unix-alikes and ";" on Windows. Used to separate paths in variables such as PATH and TEXINPUTS.

r_arch

character string, possibly "". The name of the architecture-specific directories used in this build of R.

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
}
[Package base version 2.9.0 ]