Re: gathering system information

FROM : Jens Alfke
DATE : Sat May 10 20:27:47 2008

On 10 May '08, at 8:28 AM, Torsten Curdt wrote:

> Is there any other way of collection system information like
> - OS version
> - processor speed and architecture
> - RAM
> other than calling
>  system_profiler -xml > system.plist


This was just asked a few days ago on the darwin-userlevel mailing 
list; search the archives for details. That poster wanted more info 
than you list here, but the answer was that it would be more trouble 
than it's worth to collect it manually. In particular it was stated 
that determining the user-visible name of the processor would require 
making your own lookup table, since those names are based more on 
marketing than on explicit ID numbers.

Note that you don't have to make system_profiler write to a file. You 
can call it with NSTask, attach an NSPipe to its stdout, and read that 
with an NSFileHandle.

—Jens