Finding the bitness of an arbitrary executable with Python

[Richard Thomas]

On May 9, 9:52 pm, Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I need to find whether a given file is 32-bit or 64-bit (and raise an
> exception if the file doesn't exist or isn't an executable file). I
> thought platform.architecture() would do this, but it returns ('64bit',
> '') no matter what value I assign to the executable parameter (looks
> like it uses the given executable to find info on the underlying system
> rather than info on the specific file, reverting to sys.executable if
> there are any errors). A quick look on Google doesn't give me anything
> useful. Something cross-platform would be nice, but it really only needs
> to work on Windows (on win32 binaries).

I don't know of anything that does that. If you wanted to do it
yourself the correct place to start is by reading up on the Protable
Executable Format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PE_format. That page
has references to the MSDN article which is probably most useful.
Other platforms have other executable formats of course but there's no
reason it couldn't exist...