On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 18:24, Richard Guy Briggs <rgb [ at ] tricolour [ dot ] net> wrote: > Not quite what you intended, but how about: > file $(which uname) > I often do exactly this with '/bin/ls' to test the OS bitness. Another alternative is to use gcc -dumpmachine ... which is available on all systems that matter :-) -Bart