Ruby How to determine execution environment

Question

I need to determine what environment my ruby script is running in so I can remove files and clean up directories after execution.

I tried using ENV['os'] but I am using cygwin and it gave me Windows_NT, Does anyone know a way to find the current environment?

Thanks

Possible duplicate of [How can I find which operating system my Ruby program is running on?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/170956/how-can-i-find-which-operating-system-my-ruby-program-is-running-on) — sondra.kinsey, Mar 14 '19 at 17:56

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 21 '13 at 16:42

The current environment is provided by the global constant RUBY_PLATFORM

ruby invoked at the cygwin bash shell (/usr/bin/ruby):

puts RUBY_PLATFORM
i386-cygwin

ruby invoked at the command prompt (c:\Ruby193\bin\ruby.exe):

puts RUBY_PLATFORM
i386-mingw32

puts ENV['OS'] for both of the above environment returns: Windows_NT

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 02 '14 at 18:32

3

The current os can be obtained from RUBY_PLATFORM

puts RUBY_PLATFORM
X86_64-linux

However, when I use ENV['os'] on Linux machine, Ruby returns nil.

answered May 02 '14 at 18:32

euccas

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 29 '11 at 15:47

1

I've used the gem 'OS' which can be found here: http://rubygems.org/gems/os

I haven't tried it with cygwin, but I did replace my own use of the ENV variable hash with it.

answered Jun 29 '11 at 15:47

Ryanmt

This question also addresses your problem. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/170956/ruby-how-can-i-find-out-on-which-system-my-program-is-running – Ryanmt Jun 29 '11 at 15:48
os gem works beautifully. We can do things like `OS::windows?` `OS::linux?` – rpattabi Sep 11 '12 at 14:26

3 Answers3