5 Sep 2012
A question I get regularly from other sysadmins - how to tell if you’re running a 32 or 64 bit install (vs CPU) of Linux?
Here’s one way - use the file command on /sbin/init:
# on a 32 bit install
% file /sbin/init
/sbin/init: ELF 32-bit LSB executable....
# on a 64 bit install
% file /sbin/init
/sbin/init: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64...
Update
I got a few comments on this (thank you) saying that I was wrong or “haven’t you heard of uname?”…
1. CPU vs Kernel
One comment said I was wrong and should use grep against the cpu info:
$ grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep lm
Unfortunately the commenter hadn’t read my post correctly - I’m interested in whether the operating system is 32⁄64 bit, not the cpu.
2. Use uname
Other comments said I should use uname with particular flags (as if I’d never heard of uname before….). Unfortunately the manpage for uname is a good example of manpage considered harmful. Let’s have a look at what it says for the various options:
% man uname
...
-m, --machine
print the machine hardware name
-p, --processor
print the processor type or "unknown"
-i, --hardware-platform
print the hardware platform or "unknown"
...
What is the difference between the “machine hardware name”, the “processor type”, and the “hardware platform”? Googling doesn’t turn up a good explanation. I could look at the source code for uname, or run uname on a machine I which already has known hardware and interpret the results, then work out the flags to use on the target machine. Or I could just rote-memorise uname -m and not know what it means.
Bzzt, fail. I know what the file command does, I use it regularly for cross-compiling stuff.
file /sbin/init is what I use.
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