How do I determine if my python shell is executing

Question

I need a way to tell what mode the shell is in from within the shell.

I've tried looking at the platform module but it seems only to tell you about "about the bit architecture and the linkage format used for the executable": the binary is compiled as 64bit though (I'm running on OS X 10.6) so it seems to always report 64bit even though I'm using the methods described here to force 32bit mode).

Answer 1

import sys
print(sys.version)

3.5.1 (v3.5.1:37a07cee5969, Dec 6 2015, 01:54:25) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)]

Answer 2

struct.calcsize("P") returns size of the bytes required to store a single pointer. On a 32-bit system, it would return 4 bytes. On a 64-bit system, it would return 8 bytes.

So the following would return 32 if you're running 32-bit python and 64 if you're running 64-bit python:

Python 2

import struct;print struct.calcsize("P") * 8

Python 3

import struct;print(struct.calcsize("P") * 8)

Answer 3

On my Centos Linux system I did the following:

1) Started the Python interpreter (I'm using 2.6.6)
2) Ran the following code:

import platform
print(platform.architecture())

and it gave me

(64bit, 'ELF')

Answer 4

Basically a variant on Matthew Marshall's answer (with struct from the std.library):

import struct
print struct.calcsize("P") * 8

Answer 5

For a non-programmatic solution, look in the Activity Monitor. It lists the architecture of 64-bit processes as “Intel (64-bit)”.

Answer 6

When starting the Python interpreter in the terminal/command line you may also see a line like:

Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 12 2011, 14:24:46) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32

Where [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] means 64-bit Python. Works for my particular setup.