platform.popen(cmd, mode='r', bufsize=-1) Portable popen() interface. Find a working popen implementation preferring win32pipe.popen(). On Windows NT, win32pipe.popen() should work; on Windows 9x it hangs due to bugs in the MS C library. Deprecated since version 3.3: This function is obsolete. Use the subprocess module. Check especially the Replacing Older Functions with the subprocess Module section.

platform.python_implementation() Returns a string identifying the Python implementation. Possible return values are: ‘CPython’, ‘IronPython’, ‘Jython’, ‘PyPy’.

platform.python_compiler() Returns a string identifying the compiler used for compiling Python.

platform.python_version() Returns the Python version as string 'major.minor.patchlevel'. Note that unlike the Python sys.version, the returned value will always include the patchlevel (it defaults to 0).

platform.processor() Returns the (real) processor name, e.g. 'amdk6'. An empty string is returned if the value cannot be determined. Note that many platforms do not provide this information or simply return the same value as for machine(). NetBSD does this.

platform.python_branch() Returns a string identifying the Python implementation SCM branch.

platform.python_build() Returns a tuple (buildno, builddate) stating the Python build number and date as strings.

platform.platform(aliased=0, terse=0) Returns a single string identifying the underlying platform with as much useful information as possible. The output is intended to be human readable rather than machine parseable. It may look different on different platforms and this is intended. If aliased is true, the function will use aliases for various platforms that report system names which differ from their common names, for example SunOS will be reported as Solaris. The system_alias() function i

platform.machine() Returns the machine type, e.g. 'i386'. An empty string is returned if the value cannot be determined.

platform.mac_ver(release='', versioninfo=('', '', ''), machine='') Get Mac OS version information and return it as tuple (release, versioninfo, machine) with versioninfo being a tuple (version, dev_stage, non_release_version). Entries which cannot be determined are set to ''. All tuple entries are strings.