.. title: 32-bit or 64-bit Hardware
.. slug: 32-bit_or_64-bit_system
.. date: 2009/04/01 18:25
.. description: A solution to determining if your system will support a 64-bit Operating System.
.. tags: linux, bash

**How do you tell if you're running on 32-bit or 64-bit hardware?**

While the command ``uname -a`` will show wether you are using a 32-bit or 64-bit Operating System (as well as possibly looking at ``/etc/*release``), it won't tell you if your hardware is actually 64-bit or not.

Instead, look at ``/proc/cpuinfo`` by running ``cat /proc/cpuinfo`` and look for lm in the flags section. If this flag exists, it's a 64-bit architecture for your CPU.

An easy way to do this is to type the following command.  A blank line will be returned if it's false (i.e., not 64-bit) or it will print one or more lines (depending on the number of CPUs and Cores in your computer).

.. code-block:: bash

 $ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep lm