That should be simple enough. The host OS will have Perl installed (as far as I know it has been installed by default since the first OS X). Have your app's perl find out where the system perl is (maybe a system call to which perl?) and then use that perl to examine its Config.

Hope this helps!

It’s been almost 20 years but IIRC you are quite right. The OS X beta had the dev tools more “above the fold” than OS X currently does, again, if I’m remembering correctly. I do remember how goddamn painful getting modperl installed was. 80% my systardiness and 20% dearth of documentation on a bleeding edge OS.

Also, thanks for the Config reminder. Just yesterday I wrote a test that should have used it but I went all qx{} on it like a dummy. :P

Ah, so simple. Didn't thought about it! I'll give it a try, but it seems a good solution. Cheers.

Well, as long as you are shelling out with a system call, there is probably a native MacOS program to tell you the OS version ... I just always think of Perl solutions :-)

Update: sw_vers -productVersion seems to be the needed utility:

$ perl -E'say qx/sw_vers -productVersion/'
10.12.6
[download]

Note that this is a different value than that shown by using Config!

$ perl -MConfig -E'say $Config{osvers}'
16.7.0
[download]

The latter appears to be the macOS build version, in fact, and can be different from the time Perl was built to the present:

$ perl -E'say qx/sw_vers -buildVersion/'
16G1510
[download]

Hope this helps!



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

"What is important is 16.7.0 and so on."

Are you sure about that? 16.7.0 (and darwin) refer to the Kernel Version:

[Note: I'm using Sierra 10.12.5.]

$ system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType
Software:

    System Software Overview:

      System Version: macOS 10.12.5 (16F73)
      Kernel Version: Darwin 16.6.0
      ...
[download]

It sounds like you really want the System Version. If so, and you only want the version number, this might be easier:

$ sw_vers -productVersion
10.12.5
[download]

To get at this information, you can use backticks, qx{}, open with '-|' mode, and other methods (the open doco has links to some of these). And, of course, add appropriate error handling.

Mac::OSVersion (already suggested by ++marto) uses both of those commands with backticks. It also provides a name() method; however, the names are hard-coded:

my @names = qw( Cheetah Puma Jaguar Panther Tiger Leopard ) ;
push @names, 'Snow Leopard', 'Lion', 'Mountain Lion',
        'Mavericks', 'Yosemite', 'El Capitan', 'Sierra',
        'High Sierra', 'Mojave';
[download]

There's a potential problem with this. When Apple releases a new (named) version, that module will need to be updated, you'll need to upgrade to that updated version, and your users may need a similar upgrade.

If you wanted to handle the names yourself, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201260 has a list of names and version numbers. It looks like this information is kept up-to-date: it was last updated a month ago.