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Since I do dabble in programming a little myself, I began to wonder how to determine if an application was really 64bit or "just" 64 bit from Terminal.
Before we can test this, just a small clarification: Your Mac applications, the way the user sees them, are actually not application, but rather a directory with the extension ".app". Right click an application and choose "Show Package Content" and Finder will open this "special" directory like a normal directory.
Here we will find the actual executable in "Contents/MacOS".
OK, now that we are aware of this ... the "file" command in Terminal will give us the info we need.
Let's look at 2 examples ... first TextWrangler and I see that this is actually a 32 bit application (i386):
$ file /Applications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/MacOS/TextWrangler
/Applications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/MacOS/TextWrangler: Mach-O executable i386
Our second example is TextEdit, which appears actually a 64 bit application (x86_64):
$ file /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
