R: Extract System and User Information

Sys.info {base}

R Documentation

Extract System and User Information

Description

Reports system and user information.

Usage

Sys.info()

Details

This uses POSIX or Windows system calls. Note that OS names (sysname) might not be what you expect: for example macOS identifies itself as ‘⁠Darwin⁠’ and Solaris as ‘⁠SunOS⁠’.

Sys.info() returns details of the platform R is running on, whereas R.version gives details of the platform R was built on: the release and version may well be different.

Value

A character vector with fields

`sysname`	The operating system name.
`release`	The OS release.
`version`	The OS version.
`nodename`	A name by which the machine is known on the network (if any).
`machine`	A concise description of the hardware, often the CPU type.
`login`	The user's login name, or `"unknown"` if it cannot be ascertained.
`user`	The name of the real user ID, or `"unknown"` if it cannot be ascertained.
`effective_user`	The name of the effective user ID, or `"unknown"` if it cannot be ascertained. This may differ from the real user in ‘set-user-ID’ processes.
`udomain`	The domain name for the user. Only available on Windows.

On Unix-alike platforms:: The first five fields come from the uname(2) system call. The login name comes from getlogin(2), and the user names from getpwuid(getuid()) and getpwuid(geteuid()).
On Windows:: Fields login, user and effective_user give the same value. udomain is the corresponding domain.

Note

The meaning of release and version is system-dependent: on a Unix-alike they normally refer to the kernel. There, usually release contains a numeric version and version gives additional information. Examples for release:

    "4.17.11-200.fc28.x86_64" # Linux (Fedora)
    "3.16.0-5-amd64"          # Linux (Debian)
    "17.7.0"                  # macOS 10.13.6
    "5.11"                    # Solaris

There is no guarantee that the node or login or user names will be what you might reasonably expect. (In particular on some Linux distributions the login name is unknown from sessions with re-directed inputs.)

The use of alternatives such as system("whoami") is not portable: the POSIX command system("id") is much more portable on Unix-alikes, provided only the POSIX options -[Ggu][nr] are used (and not the many BSD and GNU extensions). whoami is equivalent to id -un (on Solaris, /usr/xpg4/bin/id -un).

Windows may report unexpected versions: there, see the help for

Examples

Sys.info()
## An alternative (and probably better) way to get the login name on Unix
Sys.getenv("LOGNAME")

[Package base version 4.5.0 Index]