Get System Information from the command line
Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Command Line, How to
Regardless of how many Mac’s you administer, there will surely come a time when you’ll need to retrieve relevant System Information. Gathering system information from the command line is vital for system and network administration, so the next time you’ve accessed a machine through SSH, find out what you need to know with two helpful command line tools. Here’s how, using the the sw_vers command and the system_profiler command:
sw_vers
The sw_vers command is short and sweet, it will give you the current operating system version and build number, with output as such:
$ sw_vers
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.4.9
BuildVersion: 8P2137
system_profiler
system_profiler is just a command line interface to the GUI app System Profiler (found in your Utilities folder). It’s very handy for learning about a machine over a network or remote connection via SSH. The standard output will blast you with screenfulls of content so it is best to pipe through the more command as follows:
$ system_profiler | more
This will allow you to view the output of system_profiler one screen at a time, navigable by the arrow keys and page up/down.
If you’re looking for information on your Airport connection, be sure to use the hidden Airport utility discussed here.
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Comments:
Comments: 4
Comment from orville
Time: April 23, 2007, 5:40 pm
also you can use uname for unix related stats and information about your system
uname -a
it will spit back kernel info
Comment from Jay
Time: April 23, 2007, 7:44 pm
/proc is a wondrous thing on ubuntu/debian (and more I’m sure) distros
cat /proc/cpuinfo for processor info
cat /proc/meminfo for RAM status
Comment from mugab
Time: April 27, 2007, 8:34 pm
Jay’s tip is right but it doesn’t work on the Mac, is there a Mac OS X equivalent to the information in /proc ?
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