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My application is assumed to be running on a Mac OS X system. However, what I need to do is figure out what version of Mac OS (or Darwin) it is running on, preferably as a number. For instance,

  • "10.4.11" would return either 10.4 or 8
  • "10.5.4" would return 10.5 or 9
  • "10.6" would return 10.6 or 10

I found out that you could do this, which returns "8.11.0" on my system:

import os
os.system("uname -r")

Is there a cleaner way to do this, or at least a way to pull the first number from the result? Thanks!

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5 Answers 5

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50 
>>> import platform
>>> platform.mac_ver()
('10.5.8', ('', '', ''), 'i386')

As you see, the first item of the tuple mac_ver returns is a string, not a number (hard to make '10.5.8' into a number!-), but it's pretty easy to manipulate the 10.x.y string into the kind of numbers you want. For example,

>>> v, _, _ = platform.mac_ver()
>>> v = float('.'.join(v.split('.')[:2]))
>>> print v
10.5

If you prefer the Darwin kernel version rather than the MacOSX version, that's also easy to access -- use the similarly-formatted string that's the third item of the tuple returned by platform.uname().

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3 Comments

Unfortunately, this works on Debian (and probably other Linux) as well, giving false positives if you use this function to check if the system is Mac OS X
@RobertMoore platform.system() should be used to detect the underlying OS rather than directly relying on mac_ver()
This does not work for Big Sur. mac_ver()[0] returns 10.16, while I'm on 11.6.7. Of course, there is no 10.16 version, but 10.16 = 11 and no minor release info is provided. However, mac_ver()[0] does appear to work on Monterey, returning 12.4 on that system.
4

If you are already using os, you might want to use os.uname() 

import os
os.uname()
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1 Comment

This gives the release version of Darwin itself -- for instance, Catalina is 19.6.0--it might be helpful in some contexts, but original poster is looking for the macOS version like 10.9
1

You could parse the output of the /usr/bin/sw_vers command.

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2 Comments

The uname command will give him the version - his problem is in how to get this value into a variable.
Well, at least it gives the kernel version - but he seems to have an overall problem of being able to read command output into a variable.
1

platform.mac_ver() will return a tuple (release, versioninfo, machine

So get mac version by code

>>> platform.mac_ver()[0]

'10.8.4'

this method is easy

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0

If you want to run a command - like 'uname' - and get the results as a string, use the subprocess module.

import subprocess
output = subprocess.Popen(["uname", "-r"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
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