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.

Solution 1

There are many ways, but try uname -a.

Solution 2

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

Comments

[Doug Harris]

uname -p gives just the processor architecture. man uname for other options.

[Era]

Not with me. arch outputs i368 and uname -m outputs x84_86. I run OSX on a 64bit machine.

[Dennis Williamson]

@ErikAigner: Typo, perhaps? Shouldn't it be x86_64?

[Era]

Of course arch should return x86_64, that's why it's so strange. But I don't know why.

[Davi Lima]

Same here: $ uname -m x86_64 $ arch i386

[GP89]

@DougHarris I get x86_64 with -a but i386 with -p

[廖茂生]

@GP89 Have the same condition with you.