Bash Number Limit?

Question

I asked a question earlier that involved pulling large primes from a text file and putting them into another file. It was supposed to grab every prime up to and including th

Answer 1

No, it is independent from the bitsize of your OS. It depends upon a simple declaration deep in the bash sources.

This declaration is __int64_t since around 2002. Since then, bash versions >= 3.00 always use 64bit integer variables, and it doesn't depend on the architecture! It only depends on the bash version.

Previous versions of bash used always 32 bit integer, even on 64 bit OS.