Call the Win32 function GetVersionEx.

However, the docs for that advise, "Identifying the current operating system is usually not the best way to determine whether a particular operating system feature is present. This is because the operating system may have had new features added in a redistributable DLL. Rather than using GetVersionEx to determine the operating system platform or version number, test for the presence of the feature itself. For more information, see Operating System Version."

But no matter what you do I cant help but saying that some of your regexen worry me a bit. Like for instance you are using dot unescaped. Personally I might try to come up with a regex that pulled apart the various version strings and then looked them up in a hash. Something like

local $,="\t";
while (<DATA>) {
    /Windows\s(\w+)\W+Version\s((?:\d+\.?)+)/ && print $1,$2,"\n";
}
#Outputs 
# 98      4.10.1998    
# 2000    5.00.2195    
# 95      4.00.1111    
# NT      3.51    
# NT      4.0    
__DATA__
Windows 98 [Version 4.10.1998]
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
Microsoft Windows 95. [Version 4.00.1111]
Windows NT Version 3.51
Windows NT Version 4.0
[download]

:-)

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

D'oh! You're absolutely right about the regexn (escaping periods). I've seen it several times from reading critiques of other nodes. Believe it or not I've been using Perl for 4.5 years and have never had to use regexen more than once or twice. Having complete control over your own input is nice and makes coding so much easier.

Fortunately, there are patient souls around to remind me. I've been playing the piano for 35 years but am still taking lessons. It keeps me honest.

I'll pursue both yours and John's leads before I make a decision. I might have to stick with the DOS VER backticks angle due to code size though. The majority of users that will be running this code won't have Perl (thus Perl2exe) and I know that each additional module requirement is going to cause a hit in areas of startup time and memory required.

The goal is not to make a perfect assessment, but to offer the user a reasonable guess as to which platform they are using (like setting a default for an OS picklist). If they don't know what OS they have, they can't possibly have already installed the correct version of the software this program will be referencing.

Thanks to both you and John for replying.

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -- Thomas Alva Edison

use Win32;
print "$_\n" for Win32::GetOSVersion();
[download]

Win32::GetOSVersion() CORE Returns the array (STRING, MAJOR, MINOR, BUILD, ID), where the elements are, respectively: An arbitrary descriptive string, the major version number of the operating system, the minor version number, the build number, and a digit indicating the actual operating system. For ID, the values are 0 for Win32s, 1 for Windows 9X and 2 for Windows NT. In scalar context it returns just the ID.

For those that might try to cut/paste $code or dies' example:   print "$_\n" for Win32::GetOsVersion(); should read:   print "$_\n" for Win32::GetOSVersion(); Win32::GetOSVersion() showed up in the initial searches I made via The Perl CD Bookshelf. It was the first thing I tested but I forgot to mention it in the original post. Apologies for that.

My primary objection to it was that I couldn't easily discern whether a system was using Windows 2000 or not. The software that I'm looking at must distinguish between win2k and nt. I'll confirm this at work Monday, since I don't have access to win2k at home. It also doesn't mention anything about Windows ME, although for my purposes it can be lumped together with win9x.

Thanks for bringing it up though, as others will want to be aware of it as a alternative approach.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

Untested, but you should get the jist:

my @winver = Win32::GetOSVersion();
print "Windows 2000" if $winver[1] == 5 and $winver[4] == 2;
[download]

To find out it it's Windows Me or Windows 98 or Windows 95, you'd need somthing like this:

# I'm guessing at the major Windows versions for 9x here, but it shoul
+d be easy to test:
print "Windows 95" if $winver[1] == 1 and $winver[4] == 1;
print "Windows 98" if $winver[1] == 2 and $winver[4] == 1;
print "Windows Me" if $winver[1] == 3 and $winver[4] == 1;
[download]

Alternatively, you could build a lookup:

my $version_lookup =  [
    [],           # Win32s (not sure what goes here)
    [ undef, "Windows95", "Windows98", "WindowsMe" ],
    [ undef, undef, undef, "NT 3", "NT 4", "Windows 2000"]
];

my @winver = Win32::GetOSVersion();

printf "Operating System is %s", $version_lookup->[$winver[4]]->[$winv
+er[1]];
[download]

My point is here, that there are loads of ways of doing this, but this way is much better than using the output of "ver" You get all the imformation that "ver" gives but in a way that makes it easy to use without a regex. Plus it's easily extendible - XP is out this month, I'd be willing to bet that you could detect XP like this: (or something very similar)



print "I'm XP!!" if $winver[1] == 6 and $winver[4] == 2;
[download]

Do you know what the output of ver will be for Windows XP?

Simon Flack ($code or die)
$,=reverse'"ro_';s,$,\$,;s,$,lc ref sub{},e;$,
=~y'_"' ';eval"die";print $_,lc substr$@,0,3;