How to determine kernel bitness in Mac OS X 10.6?

Question

I know that I can use the terminal and the system-profiler command to determine the current bitness of the kernel but I am trying to determine if there is a way to get that

Answer 1

You should be able to read the system profiler information in from command line like this:

sys_profile = popen("system_profiler -xml", "r");

See the ProfileSystem example in Apple's documentation for how to parse it.

Software/System Software Overview/64-bit Kernel and Extensions is probably the key you want.