I have a perl app that can be run on any flavour of Windows, including Windows 7 64 bits.

This app needs to occasionally make external calls to an EXE file. Unfortunately, that EXE needs to be compiled differently for 32 vs 64 bits versions of Windows.

So, my script needs to know which version of Windows it's running on, in order to invoke either the 32 bit or the 64 bit version of the script.

I tried using the $^O variable, but it tells me MSWin32, eventhough the script is running on Win64. My guess is that the value of $^O is the name of the OS under which the perl interpreter was COMPILED, but I need the version of the OS that the perl interpreter is RUNNING on. For all sorts of reasons, we don't want to migrate the perl interpreter to 64 bit version yet.

Is there a way to tell what OS the perl interpreter is RUNNING on?

Thx.

In reply to How to know the Windows OS that perl is running on by alain_desilets

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.