If you need to locate the serial number for a Mac OS X system, you can do so by clicking on the Apple icon in the upper, left-hand corner of the screen then selecting About This Mac and then clicking on the More Info... button.
The window also shows the year the system was manufactured, the processor speed, amount of memory in the system, graphics adapter, and the version of the operating system as well as the serial number.
If you need to get the serial number from a shell prompt, i.e., a command
line interface, you can use the ioreg command:
$ ioreg -l | awk '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ {print $4;}'
"W89491TFCCC"If you are on version 10.3 or later of OS X, you can also determine the
serial number by using the system_profiler command.
$ system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/Serial/ {print $4}'
W89491TFCCC
