How can I find the serial number on a mac programmatically from the terminal?

Question

What command can I use to retrieve the system's serial number from the unix command line? As uname will output some information about the software and hardware, I would like to retrieve the serial number from a command to use in a script.

Answer 1

The system_profiler command is perhaps the best tool for the job (assuming you are on 10.3 or newer), but you can also use ioreg for the task.

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType is the data type that contains the core hardware information, and you can use grep or awk to pare things down further as needed:

• system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/Serial/ {print $4}'
• ioreg -l | awk '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ { print $4;}'