Linux: To know whether the system is 32-bit or 64-bit

There are several ways to find this:

1)The kernel version can be found by, using "uname -m" command.
$ uname -a

i686      -->  32-bit
i386      -->  32-bit ==> so, ix86 --> 32-bit

x86_64  -->  64-bit


2) by using the getconf command as below
$ getconf LONG_BIT
This straight away returns 32 or 64.