How do I check if installed VLC is 64 bit or 32 bit?

Question

How do I check if installed VLC is 64 bit or 32 bit, if I installed using:

sudo apt-get install vlc

NOTE: Unless overridden, the package selected by apt-get will be the same bitiness as the underlying OS if at all possible. — mdpc, Sep 20 '14 at 02:13

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 20 '14 at 00:25

Using the file command from terminal:

file $(which vlc)

In my case the vlc version is 64-bit:

/usr/bin/vlc: ELF 64-bit LSB  executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically
linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24,
BuildID[sha1]=63a2c2e7d5b12db4ad69cc38da86622492649af9, stripped

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 20 '14 at 00:31

Alternatively, you can ask the packaging system what you installed:

$ dpkg -s vlc    
Package: vlc
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: video
Installed-Size: 3765
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 2.1.4-0ubuntu14.04.1
...

Here, the architecture is shown to be amd64, or 64-bit.

While not a problem with vlc, the file approach can fail with the obvious program names for some packages, like firefox:

$ file $(which firefox)
/usr/bin/firefox: symbolic link to `../lib/firefox/firefox.sh'

You could follow the link, but then you'd be looking at a script.

How do I check if installed VLC is 64 bit or 32 bit?

2 Answers2

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