How can a java program decide which command to execute depending of os

Question

I have to make a program which will print the network settings using "ipconfig" for Windows and "ifconfig" for Linux, but I need to do that with a unique implementation for both OS.

Answer 1

You can get the name of the operating system through

System.getProperty("os.name")

Have a look at this page for some sample code.

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If it's by any chance the IP of the local host you're interested in, there are ways to get this directly in Java:

• Getting the IP Address and Hostname of the Local Machine
• Get the workstation name/ip

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There is no way to determine what the "show ip information"-command is for an arbitrary operating system. You will have to hard-code what the command is (if the is one) for each operating system name manually.

Answer 2

As a complement to the other answers, I'll mention SystemUtils from Commons Lang which exposes various constant such as IS_OS_UNIX, IS_OS_WINDOWS, etc.

Answer 3

Building on aioobe's solution:

final String osname = System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase();
String processName;
if(osname.startsWith("win"))
    processName="ipconfig /some /parameter";
else
    processName="ifconfig -some -parameter";
Runtime.getRuntime().exec(processName);

Answer 4

For reference, here's a concrete example that sets a property only for a particular OS:

if (System.getProperty("os.name").startsWith("Mac OS X")) {
    System.setProperty("apple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz", "true");
}