proper way to determine arch of *installed* OS, not processor?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 6 May 2011, Pongo Pan wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 13:55 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> >   i should have been clearer that i need something that is
> > linux-agnostic; hence my reference to "uname", but i don't remember if
> > any of the uname options specifically report "32" when it's a 32-bit
> > install on a 64-bit system.
> >
> >   i see this very question on an occasional basis, so there must be an
> > answer somewhere.
>
>
> I've got 32 bit Mint XFCE installed on this 64 bit veteran:
>
>
>   pongo at diogenes ~ $ uname -a
>   Linux diogenes 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Wed Jan 12 04:01:41 UTC 2011 i686
> GNU/Linux
>
> Looks like uname correctly reports the i686 kernel.  It says "unknown"
> for the -i (hardware platform) and -p (processor) options.  Hardware
> details in my .sig are from /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo via some
> python.

  ok, so what does "uname -m" report?  this might be what i'm looking
for.

rday