Open "About This Mac" from Terminal?

Question

This probably seems totally useless to most, but i've got a specific need to open the "About This Mac" dialog from within Terminal. Any idea if its possible?

I suppose AppleScript might be the way to - what I need to do is for quality control purposes take a photo of the Mac booted into its desktop and the About This Mac screen includes its spec and serial number for proof. I suppose for a total hands off way of doing this, opening it, screenshotting it and then sending e-mail the screenshot or sending to Dropbox etc would probably be idea - I guess a screenshot is just as good as a photo with my iPhone.

Any input into either method would be excellent.

Answer 1

You can also run:

~ system_profiler > my_profile

To dump much of the same information to a more parseable file called my_profile.

If you simply want the system's serial number (that could be sent however you want really), you could use:

~ system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/Serial/ {print $4}'

If you are hoping for a screenshot of About this Mac for proof of a running desktop maybe this is better:

~ screencapture -l \
$(osascript -e 'tell app "System Information" to id of window 1') \
system_information.png

Answer 2

open /Applications/Utilities/System\ Information.app && screencapture filename.jpg

Will open System Information and save a screencap to filename.jpg You can then copy/email/print/etc. that file.

System Information.app launches with a screen that shows:

• Model Name
• Model Identifier
• Processor Name
• Processor Speed
• Number of processors
• Number of cores
• L2 Cache per core
• L3 Cache
• Memory
• Boot ROM version
• SMC Version
• Serial Number
• Hardware UUID