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

This works in Python 3.10.5 on macOS

import json
import os
import time
Example MySPHardwareDataType.json created and used by this script
#{
"SPHardwareDataType" : [
{
"_name" : "hardware_overview",
"activation_lock_status" : "activation_lock_disabled",
"boot_rom_version" : "7459.121.3",
"chip_type" : "Apple M1",
"machine_model" : "MacBookPro17,1",
"machine_name" : "MacBook Pro",
"number_processors" : "proc 8:4:4",
"os_loader_version" : "7459.121.3",
"physical_memory" : "16 GB",
"platform_UUID" : "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX",
"provisioning_UDID" : "XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
"serial_number" : "XXXXXXXXXXXX"
}
]
#}
def export_basic_hwinfo_to_json(json_filename_and_path):
# This is the command that will execute.  It will run macOS' built-in
# system_profiler binary, filtered to only show the contents of 
# SPHardwareDataType, which contains the data we are looking for.
# Additionally, we have also specified that it should be exported to JSON
# format, and that standard output should be redirected to the file specified earlier
command = "system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -json >" + json_filename_and_path

# execute the command
os.popen(command)

# This loop waits for the file to exist before continuing
while os.path.exists(json_filename_and_path) is False:
    time.sleep(1)



def get_serial(json_filename_and_path) -> str:
    # open the .json file for processing
    file_handle = open(json_filename_and_path)
# load the contents of the .json file into a Python dictionary
hw_info_dict = json.load(file_handle)

# retrieve the data we are looking for
serial = hw_info_dict['SPHardwareDataType'][0]['serial_number']
return serial



def get_machine_sku(json_filename_and_path) -> str:
    # open the .json file for processing
    file_handle = open(json_filename_and_path)
# load the contents of the .json file into a Python dictionary
hw_info_dict = json.load(file_handle)

# retrieve the data we are looking for
machine_sku = hw_info_dict['SPHardwareDataType'][0]['machine_model']
return machine_sku



def get_model(json_filename_and_path) -> str:
    # open the .json file for processing
    file_handle = open(json_filename_and_path)
# load the contents of the .json file into a Python dictionary
hw_info_dict = json.load(file_handle)

# retrieve the data we are looking for
model = hw_info_dict['SPHardwareDataType'][0]['machine_name']
return model



def main():
# We are going to store the output file in a temp directory
temp_dir: str = os.environ.get('TMPDIR')
temp_dir: str = temp_dir[:-1]

json_filename: str = "MySPHardwareDataType.json"

# Cleanly append the name of the output file to the file path
json_filename_and_path: str = os.sep.join([temp_dir, json_filename])

export_basic_hwinfo_to_json(json_filename_and_path)

serial: str = get_serial(json_filename_and_path)
machine_sku: str = get_machine_sku(json_filename_and_path)
model: str = get_model(json_filename_and_path)

print(F"serial={serial}")
print(F"machine_sku={machine_sku}")
print(F"model={model}")


if name == "main":
    main()

Answer 5

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

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

Answer 6

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}'

Answer 7

It's potentially slightly cleaner to use the XML output of ioreg rather than parsing the human-readable form with sed/awk:

ioreg -c IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 2 -a | xmllint --xpath "/plist/dict[key='IORegistryEntryChildren']/array/dict/key[.='IOPlatformSerialNumber']/following-sibling::string[1]/node()" -