How To Tell If An Application Is 64-bit In Ubuntu

How To Tell If An Application Is 64-bit In Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Ibex etc.

For our example we will use the 3D program Blender.

Open the Terminal:
Applications > Accessories > Terminal
Copy this code:
file /usr/bin/blender-bin
Paste: (Edit > Paste) the code into the Terminal.
Execute The Code: Press the Enter key on the keyboard.
You should see something like this:

/usr/bin/blender-bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, 

x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), 

for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

What about other programs?

file /usr/bin/ADD PROGRAM NAME HERE

Example: (inkscape)

file /usr/bin/inkscape

/usr/bin/inkscape: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, 

x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), 

for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

What if this does not work?

For example, blender does not work but blender-bin does work.

Navigate to the /usr/bin folder.

Places > Computer > File System > usr > bin

And see if you can figure out what the correct name of the program might be.

UPDATE:

Example: What about Firefox?

For Firefox you might only see an icon or what is called a symbolic link as the terminal will confirm.

file /usr/bin/firefox
/usr/bin/firefox: symbolic link to `firefox-3.0'

So if we try right clicking on the icon and we look at the properties we can see the target is../lib/firefox-3.0.6.

So if we try that in the terminal we will see that the file in question is a directory:

file /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.6
/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.6: directory

In the directory we can see that there is an icon for Firefox. So let’s try that in the terminal.

file /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.6/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.6/firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable,
x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8,
dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

And so we have our answer!