The System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities) gives you a great deal of insight into the kind of hardware that is installed and connected to your system and the software it’s
running. It gives fast answers to the questions: “How much memory do I have?” or “What version of Safari do I have installed?” In fact, it does such a thorough job that a System Profiler report is often the first thing Apple’s support folks will ask you for when you have a problem or report a bug. Figure 12-2 shows what System Profiler looks like when you first launch it.
Tip
System Profiler has another face as well. The command-line version, /usr/sbin/system_profiler, is discussed later in this chapter.
The column on the left side is divided into three principal parts:
- Hardware
Gives a detailed listing of the hardware in and connected to your system including memory, PCI and AGP cards, ATA and SCSI devices (such as hard drives), USB- and FireWire-connected devices, AirPort card, and modem. Each item displays all the information known to the system about the device such as its model number and firmware revisions.
- Network
Gives a complete list of all the network connections on your machine and the configuration information, such as IP address, subnet mask, router address, and Ethernet address for each connection.
- Software
Provides a detailed list of the applications in the
/Applicationsfolder as well as the frameworks and kernel extensions on your system. Each item includes the name of the software component, its version number, and the date on which it was last modified.
The amount of information that the System Profiler gives you access to can be overwhelming. Thankfully, the interface does a much better job than its predecessor did in previous versions of Mac OS X by letting you drill down to the information you want to see.
Occasionally, you may be asked by Apple or some other software company to send a report from System Profiler so they can see the details of your system and troubleshoot a problem for you.
There are a variety of ways to generate this information:
Refreshing the System Profiler View
A frequent “problem” that people have with System Profiler is when they connect or disconnect a USB or FireWire device and don’t see a change in the System Profiler window. This is because System Profiler doesn’t continuously poll the system to detect changes as they happen. Once it has collected the data, its job is to display it. If you have a System Profiler window open and make changes to your hardware configuration that you want to see, use the View → Refresh (
-R) menu item.
Export the data to a plain text or rich text file (RTF) using the File → Export menu.
Print the file, but instead of sending it to your printer, save it as a PDF file using File → Print → PDF → Save as PDF.
To vary the detail level of the information in the report (as well as the size of the files generated), you can choose the level of detail you want to display using the View menu and then save, export, or print the report. When sending problem reports to Apple, it is best to err on the side of sending too much information rather than too little. However, you might want to be careful if you are actually printing out the reports—a full, extended report can run upward of 75 pages.
The system_profiler command-line tool allows you to get the same information from the command line that System Profiler gives you access to. When run with no arguments, system_profiler generates a full report, the beginning of which is shown in Example 12-1.
Example 12-1. The start of output from system_profiler
$ system_profiler
Hardware:
Hardware Overview:
Machine Name: PowerBook G4 12"
Machine Model: PowerBook6,2
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (1.1)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 768 MB
Bus Speed: 133 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.7.5f1
Serial Number: UV40605TQ77
...The full report that system_profiler outputs is quite long. You might want to save it as a file so that you can view it using a text editor, or so that you can send it to Apple or another software vendor as part of a bug report. To do this, use the following command:
$ system_profiler > ~/Desktop/MySystemProfile.txtTip
You could take this tip a step forward and add it to your crontab (see Chapter 13) so that you always have an up-to-date inventory of your system. System administrators can use this tip to keep track of machines across their networks.
To limit the amount of information that system_profiler generates, you can pass a data type as an argument. You can get the list of data types for your system by using the -listDataTypes argument, as shown in Example 12-2.
Example 12-2. Listing the data types that system_profiler can report
$ system_profiler -listDataTypes
Available Datatypes:
SPHardwareDataType
SPNetworkDataType
SPSoftwareDataType
SPParallelATADataType
SPAudioDataType
SPBluetoothDataType
SPDiagnosticsDataType
SPDiscBurningDataType
SPFibreChannelDataType
SPFireWireDataType
SPDisplaysDataType
SPMemoryDataType
SPPCCardDataType
SPPCIDataType
SPParallelSCSIDataType
SPPowerDataType
SPPrintersDataType
SPSerialATADataType
SPUSBDataType
SPAirPortDataType
SPFirewallDataType
SPNetworkLocationDataType
SPModemDataType
SPNetworkVolumeDataType
SPApplicationsDataType
SPExtensionsDataType
SPFontsDataType
SPFrameworksDataType
SPLogsDataType
SPPrefPaneDataType
SPStartupItemDataTypeArmed with this information, if you wanted to see the status of the network connections of your Mac, you could use the SPNetworkDataType argument, as shown in Example 12-3.
Example 12-3. Using system_profiler to get network interface data
$ system_profiler SPNetworkDataType
Network:
Built-in Ethernet:
Type: Ethernet
Hardware: Ethernet
BSD Device Name: en0
Has IP Assigned: Yes
IPv4 Addresses: 192.168.79.60
IPv4:
Addresses: 192.168.79.60
Configuration Method: DHCP
DHCP Client ID: ronin
Interface Name: en0
Router: 192.168.79.1
Subnet Masks: 255.255.255.0
DNS:
Server Addresses: 192.168.79.5, 192.168.79.7
DHCP Server Responses:
Domain Name Servers: 192.168.79.5,192.168.79.7
Lease Duration (seconds): 0
DHCP Message Type: 0x05
Routers: 192.168.79.1
Server Identifier: 192.168.79.5
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Proxies:
FTP Proxy Enabled: No
FTP Passive Mode: Yes
Gopher Proxy Enabled: No
HTTP Proxy Enabled: No
HTTPS Proxy Enabled: No
RTSP Proxy Enabled: No
SOCKS Proxy Enabled: No
Ethernet:
MAC Address: 00:0a:95:a9:ba:2a
Media Options: Full Duplex
Media Subtype: 100baseTX