Mac OSX : Get full system information through terminal

By | September 28, 2013

Gathering information through the GUI option “About this Mac” can be annoying and not reveal all the information you wanted. Fortunately, there is an existing command line that can provide what you are looking for.

Terminal can be launched through :

Go > Utilities > Terminal

Then several commands exist to either gather full system information or a specific piece of hardware. Let say you want to output your full system information, simply enter this command :

system_profiler

If you want to only sort the information regarding the CPU :

system_profiler | grep Processor

Sysctl can also give you some useful information that “system profiler” can’t provide for CPU info :

sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string