How to check Linux System is 64 bit or 32 bit

Author : Piyush Gupta

This article describes how to find out whether your Linux system’s OS is 32-bit or 64-bit. This will be helpful if you wanted to download or install an application in your Linux system. As we all know, we can’t install 64-bit applications into a 32-bit OS type. That’s why knowing your Linux system’s OS type is important.

Here are the five easy and simple methods to verify your Linux system’s OS type. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using a GUI or CLI type systems, the following commands will work on almost all Linux operating systems such as RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, openSUSE etc.

1. uname Command

uname -a command will display your Linux system’s OS type. This is the universal command and it will work on almost all Linux/Unix operating systems.

To find out the system’s OS type, run:

# uname -a

#64-Ubuntu Mon Sep 28 20:29:08 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

2. dpkg Command

dpkg command will also display whether your Debian/Ubuntu operating system is 32-bit or 64-bit. This command will work only on Debian and Ubuntu based distributions and it’s derivatives.

Open your Terminal, and run:

$ dpkg --print-architecture

If your OS is 64-bit, you’ll get the following output:

amd64

If your OS is 32-bit, then the output will be:

i386

3. getconf Command

getconf command will also display the system configuration variables. Now, let me show you how to find out the Linux system arch using getconf command.

$ getconf LONG_BIT

64

For more details refer the man pages.

$ man getconf

4. arch Command

arch command will display your OS type. This command is similar to uname -m command. If its output is x86_64 then it’s 64-bit OS. If the output is i686 or i386, then it’s 32-bit OS.

$ arch

x86_64

5. file Command

file command with with a special argument /sbin/init will display the OS type.

$ file /sbin/init

/sbin/init: ELF 64-bit LSB  shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), 
dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, 
BuildID[sha1]=*****, stripped