Determine the architecture of a Mac from the command line or script?

Question

I'm writing a shell script, and I need to know the architecture, i.e. PPC or Intel. Back in the day, there was a program /bin/arch that told you, but my Mac doesn't seem to have it.

Is there an easy way I can do this? Grep for something in a logfile? Call some other program that spits that out as a side effect?

It would be nice to know what OS version I'm running too, but that may not be necessary.

score 47 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 03 '10 at 16:24

47

There are many ways, but try uname -a.

answered Jun 03 '10 at 16:24

churnd

4,548
24
24

20

`uname -p` gives just the processor architecture. `man uname` for other options. – Doug Harris Jun 03 '10 at 16:55
5

@DougHarris I get x86_64 with `-a` but i386 with `-p` – GP89 Jan 29 '15 at 14:45
@GP89 Have the same condition with you. – 廖茂生 Sep 28 '20 at 07:53

score 17 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 03 '10 at 17:00

17

arch is available in /usr/bin/arch

You can get OS version information with sw_vers

$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.6.3
BuildVersion:   10D573
$ sw_vers -productVersion
10.6.3

answered Jun 03 '10 at 17:00

Doug Harris

25,888
16
76
105

score 14 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 03 '10 at 16:27

14

uname -m seems to output the same information as /bin/arch.

answered Jun 03 '10 at 16:27

Dennis Williamson

99,505
17
159
184

9

Not with me. `arch` outputs `i368` and `uname -m` outputs `x84_86`. I run OSX on a 64bit machine. – Era Dec 18 '12 at 19:35
@ErikAigner: Typo, perhaps? Shouldn't it be `x86_64`? – Dennis Williamson Dec 19 '12 at 06:02
Of course `arch` should return `x86_64`, that's why it's so strange. But I don't know why. – Era Dec 19 '12 at 07:31
1

Same here: $ uname -m x86_64 $ arch i386 – Davi Lima Jan 21 '15 at 11:31

Determine the architecture of a Mac from the command line or script?

3 Answers3