Re: gathering system information

FROM : Torsten Curdt
DATE : Sat May 10 23:45:08 2008

>> 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.


Well, got it working :) ....based on this

http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?GestaltAndCocoa

I'll write it up in a blog post soon.

> 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.


Indeed ...but I might not need the marketing names. And I assume all 
processor types that are returned are also defined in the header file.

> 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


Ah ...that's a good idea. But how would I init the NSDictionary from 
it? There are only

  dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:
  dictionaryWithContentsOfURL:

that do parsing. Or am I missing something?

cheers
--
Torsten