Elegantly Determining System Architecture Within Perl

Question

I'm looking for a simple way to determine whether a system is 32- or 64-bit from within Perl 5. I have read the perlvar manual page backwards and forwards, and have not discovered a variable that contains the system's CPU architecture (the CPU architecture Perl was compiled for will come close enough). This is the closest I have come:

chomp (my $arch = `uname -m`);

I was wondering if there was a more elegant way of determining this; I hate relying on backtick expressions, as they are both a bottleneck, tend to be insecure, and often (this example especially) break cross-platform compatibility. There is no reason Perl shouldn't already have this information available.

Answer 1

See the Config module.

Maybe checking whether $Config{'archname64'} is set would be sufficient.

Answer 2

Maybe try a CPAN module such as http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-CheckOS/ .

Answer 3

Sys::Info::OS->bitness method will determine "bitness" of your OS.