TUAW Tip: How to tell if an application is a Universal Binary

Another way to see what apps are running in rosetta is to use iClock.
http://www.scriptsoftware.com/iclock
iClock has an application menu like in OS 9 that shows you all running applications. On an Intel Mac this app menu now shows which of the applications are running in rosetta. Very handy on top of all the other features in iClock.

The size of the PPC portion of a universal binary is probably going to be lost in the noise in a world, but if you really want to get rid of it, try 'man lipo' at the command line.

I suspect removing it will cause you more aggravation than the space savings are worth in the long run, but it's your machine.

Just a note: the iLife applications don't contain the option to open them in Rosetta, beats me why. So much for using that 8-bit Garageband plug-in from a week back. :P

Scott:

To get a quick overview of all your apps, launch System Profiler, click the Applications item on the left, and after System Profiler has listed all your applications -- which takes a while -- click the Kind column header to sort by application type: Classic, "Native/Classic," PowerPC, or Universal.

To "remove" the PPC version of apps from the hard drive so they don't take up space, you can use

http://homepage.mac.com/gweston/macware/TrimTheFat.zip

nosidam, the amount of space the PPC code takes up in an application is quite small and do so make corrupt future application updates. In other words, you really shouldn't do it.

Another way to see all he apps that are Intel, Universal & PPC is to use System Profiler as it will show everything on one page.

Using the hint given on this page. If you hold down the Option key while clicking Get Info it will instead be the Show Inspector option. The differs in only one way... it's dynamic. When you click on another folder, file or app the information changes. This would allow you to scroll through your programs without having to do multiple Get Info windows.

The command:

ditto --arch i386 fat_file thin_file

Copies the contents of fat_file into thin_file, thinning executable code to intel-only on the fly.

The same can be done to remove Intel code if you have a PPC mac:

ditto --arch ppc fat_file thin_file

Note that to do this for applications, you must do it to the actual executable file (in Contents/MacOS within the package), not the .app package itself.

found it.

ditto can be used to "thin" multi-architecture ("fat") binaries during a copy.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/ditto.1.html

nosidam: yes there is, but it escapes me for now...

You can also open Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app) to see which running applications are running Intel or PowerPC code by looking in the Kind column. I'm not sure if Kind is there by default, but if not, you can add it by going to View > Columns > Kind.