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 provides a direct answer that’s easily human readable (assuming you are on 10.3 or newer), but you can also use ioreg for the task as it generally completes faster.

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}'

or

ioreg -l | awk '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ { print $4;}'

Both of those commands take between 0.5 and 0.2 seconds to run on modern SSD Macs, so if you want to optimize the command and remove the " you can have your answer in 0.005s or so:

ioreg -c IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 2 | awk -F\" '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/{print $(NF-1)}'

Answer 2

This also works…

ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber

Answer 3

C++ example from https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn1103/_index.html:

#include <CoreFoundation/CoreFoundation.h>
#include <IOKit/IOKitLib.h>

std::string 

getSerialNumber()

{

   CFStringRef serial;
    char buffer[32] = {0};
    std::string seriaNumber;

io_service_t platformExpert = IOServiceGetMatchingService(kIOMasterPortDefault,
                                                          IOServiceMatching("IOPlatformExpertDevice"));
if (platformExpert)
{
    CFTypeRef serialNumberAsCFString = IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperty(platformExpert,
                                                                       CFSTR(kIOPlatformSerialNumberKey),
                                                                       kCFAllocatorDefault, 0);
    if (serialNumberAsCFString) {
        serial = (CFStringRef)serialNumberAsCFString;
    }
    if (CFStringGetCString(serial, buffer, 32, kCFStringEncodingUTF8)) {
        seriaNumber = buffer;
    }

    IOObjectRelease(platformExpert);
}
return seriaNumber;
}

Answer 4

To make it easier to remember, use a case insensitive search:

ioreg -l | grep -i serialnumber | grep -i platform

Answer 5

If you don't want to count columns you can rely on the fact that the value is always in the last one and use

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/Serial/{print $NF}'