How Can I Detect the OS Version in Go?

Question

I'm currently writing a REST API client, and I'm trying to determine what OS the user is using in order to generate a useful User Agent string. This is going to allow me to (hopefully) make good decisions about what OS's I should bother supporting in the future.

What I'd like to do is this: generate a string that looks something like:

Linux/1.3.2 OR Darwin/1.3.2 OR Windows/1.3.2

It should work across Linux / Mac / Windows.

Currently, I'm able to retrieve the OS type (eg: 'linux' / 'windows' / 'darwin') using

runtime.GOOS

But I'm unable to find a way to grab the OS major/minor/micro versions.

Answer 1

Based on the extensive discussion in Go google group it looks like nothing reliable exists. I still suggest you to take a look at the discussion, as there are some useful ideas how to extract some information for particular OS.

PS does not the browser send this information in User_Agent?

User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36

Answer 2

Use uname (for the uname(2) syscall), which should be available on POSIX systems like Linux & MacOSX.

I don't understand why you need such precise information; BTW, on Linux, and probably MacOSX, it is in not enough, the version of the libc (and of course, of the GO runtime) matters at least as much.

^{(You should find something similar for Windows if you care)}