tell which os is used?

[dudeomanodude]

is there any c or c++ functions that will tell what OS is being used?

[matsp]

There is no standard way to do that in a program.

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Mats

[Mario F.]

No because that information is OS dependent.

[cpjust]

The only standard function you can use is system(). You'd pass it a command line string such as "uname" on UNIX to display the OS, but of course if you don't know what OS you're on you probably won't know what command to pass to system().
Does it really matter though? If you try to run a UNIX program on Windows or visa versa, they certainly won't run.

[matsp]

True enough, you can't cross-run things anyways.

What you can do is to set a #define OS linux or #define OS windows (with -D in the compile flags for example).

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Mats

[dudeomanodude]

Does it really matter though? If you try to run a UNIX program on Windows or visa versa, they certainly won't run.

I guess not. I was only wondering because there are display differences between a Linux terminal and the Windows command prompt, and thought it would be nice if I could compensate for those differences (thus necessitating the OS info). Oh well, if it was that important, I suppose I could ask the user...

[dudeomanodude]

What you can do is to set a #define OS linux or #define OS windows (with -D in the compile flags for example).

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Mats

or that!

[Elysia]

Or you could try to scan for OS-specific files and use OS-specific API!

[dudeomanodude]

Or you could try to scan for OS-specific files and use OS-specific API!

or even that!

so it can be done! sorta...

[matsp]

Well, the thing is, that if you want to USE any OS-specific features in your code, you need to know which OS you are building the application for. You can write a piece of code that tries a number of different options, but it would make very little sense, because it would have to be compiled for the OS it runs on, and at the point of building, you (as in the programmer and/or the makefile, project definition file or whatever) will know what OS this is for. So there's no point in making things more complicated by trying to do it at runtime.

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Mats