R: Platform Specific Variables

.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 former 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 macOS 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"`), `"AQUA"` (running under `R.app` on macOS), `"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. This should not be used to identify the OS.
`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 environment variables such as `PATH` and `TEXINPUTS`.
`r_arch`	character string, possibly `""`. The name of an architecture-specific directory used in this build of R.

AQUA

.Platform$GUI is set to "AQUA" under the macOS GUI, R.app. This has a number of consequences:

‘/usr/local/bin’ is appended to the PATH environment variable.
the default graphics device is set to quartz.
selects native (rather than Tk) widgets for the graphics = TRUE options of menu and select.list.
HTML help is displayed in the internal browser.
the spreadsheet-like data editor/viewer uses a Quartz version rather than the X11 one.

Examples

## Note: this can be done in a system-independent way by dir.exists()
if(.Platform$OS.type == "unix") {
   system.test <- function(...) system(paste("test", ...)) == 0L
   dir.exists2 <- function(dir)
       sapply(dir, function(d) system.test("-d", d))
   dir.exists2(c(R.home(), "/tmp", "~", "/NO")) # > T T T F
}