Checking operating system in a bash script and installing different programs

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Last updated: Feb 26, 2021

Because i have multiple machines and use both Ubuntu and macOS, I often need to alter my commands to account for differences in commands. For example, to get colorized output for the ls command, Ubuntu would use the --color flag while macOS will use the -G flag. -G in Ubuntu is for --no-group, i.e. don't print group names in long listing format. And i don't want to write two different files for Ubuntu and macOS, i want to be able to use the same .dotfiles on both systems.

You can do this with either $OSTYPE or uname -s.

$OSTYPE on Ubuntu 20.04 is linux-gnu and on macOS Big Sur it is darwin20.0

# Flush DNS cache
if [[ $OSTYPE == darwin* ]]; then
  # works on macOS
  alias flushdns='sudo dscacheutil -flushcache'
elif [[ $OSTYPE == linux* ]]; then
  # works on Ubuntu 18.04+
  alias flushdns='sudo systemd-resolve --flush-caches'
fi

uname -s prints the operating system name. Once you have that, you can use an if/esle or case statement on it

UNAME=$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')

# example if/esle statement 1
if [[ $UNAME = darwin ]]; then
  echo "You are on macOS"
elif [[ $UNAME = linux ]]; then 
  echo "You are on Linux"
fi

# example if/esle statement 2
[[ $UNAME = darwin ]] && echo "You are on macOS" || echo "You are on macOS"

# example if/esle statement 3
if [[ $UNAME = darwin ]]; then echo "You are on macOS"; else echo "You are on macOS"; fi

# use -G (masOS) or --color (Ubuntu) to get colorized output for ls command
if [[ $UNAME = darwin ]]; then ls -G ~; else ls --color ~; fi

I got this from Google's install script from Firebase CLI, which adjusts the binary file you need to download based on whatever system you're on

echo "-- Checking your machine type..."

# Now we need to detect the platform we're running on (Linux / Mac / Other)
# so we can fetch the correct binary and place it in the correct location
# on the machine.

# We use "tr" to translate the uppercase "uname" output into lowercase
UNAME=$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')

# Then we map the output to the names used on the Github releases page
case "$UNAME" in
    linux*)     MACHINE=linux;;
    darwin*)    MACHINE=macos;;
esac

# If we never define the $MACHINE variable (because our platform is neither Mac
# or Linux), then we can't finish our job, so just log out a helpful message
# and close.
if [ -z "$MACHINE" ]
then
    echo "Your operating system is not supported, if you think it should be please file a bug."
    echo "https://github.com/firebase/firebase-tools/"
    echo "-- All done!"

    send_analytics_event "missing_platform_$UNAME"
    exit 0
fi