How do I determine if my python shell is executing in 32bit or 64bit?

Question

I need a way to tell what mode the shell is in from within the shell.

While I\'m primarily an OS X user, I\'d be interested in knowing about other platforms as well.<

Answer 1

One way is to look at sys.maxsize as documented here:

$ python-32 -c 'import sys;print("%x" % sys.maxsize, sys.maxsize > 2**32)'
('7fffffff', False)
$ python-64 -c 'import sys;print("%x" % sys.maxsize, sys.maxsize > 2**32)'
('7fffffffffffffff', True)

sys.maxsize was introduced in Python 2.6. If you need a test for older systems, this slightly more complicated test should work on all Python 2 and 3 releases:

$ python-32 -c 'import struct;print( 8 * struct.calcsize("P"))'
32
$ python-64 -c 'import struct;print( 8 * struct.calcsize("P"))'
64

BTW, you might be tempted to use platform.architecture() for this. Unfortunately, its results are not always reliable, particularly in the case of OS X universal binaries.

$ arch -x86_64 /usr/bin/python2.6 -c 'import sys,platform; print platform.architecture()[0], sys.maxsize > 2**32'
64bit True
$ arch -i386 /usr/bin/python2.6 -c 'import sys,platform; print platform.architecture()[0], sys.maxsize > 2**32'
64bit False