Strange question - Serial Number of USB key in Unix

cap10subtext · Sep 16th, 2010, 11:11 PM

Does anyone know how I get the serial number off a USB key a unix command (or commands) in terminal?

I can see it plain as day in the System profiler, but a google search turns up nothing useful.

Thanks.

Stephanie · Sep 17th, 2010, 08:03 AM

The system profiler can be called from the command line:
system_profiler | more

That will give you all the same info. If you want to just extract the serial number of a particular device out, you could use a combination of other standard commands like grep or awk to filter it down to what you want.

Do a "man system_profiler" for more info on the command line version of it.

Edited to add:

Here's an example of a one-line unix command that finds the serial number of my USB hard drive enclosure:
system_profiler | grep -A 10 "Product ID: 0x2329" | grep "Serial Number"

It returns:
Serial Number: 9545FFFFFFFF

In this case, I know the product ID of the usb enclosure, "0x2329". You can find the product ID of your USB key in system profiler and then just use that in the unix command. You could also use the vendor id, or product name, or whatever other common identifier you wanted to grab onto.

WCraig · Sep 17th, 2010, 08:07 AM

A Terminal command appears to give what you're after:

Code:

system_profiler SPUSBDataType

The relevant bits for my disk are:

Code:

        USB DISK:

          Capacity: 1.86 GB
          Removable Media: Yes
          Detachable Drive: Yes
          BSD Name: disk2
          Product ID: 0x1000
          Vendor ID: 0x090c  (Silicon Motion, Inc. - Taiwan)
          Version: 11.00
          Serial Number: AA08061700012275
          Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
          Manufacturer: SMI Corporation
          Location ID: 0xfd300000
          Current Available (mA): 500
          Current Required (mA): 100
          Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
          Partition Map Type: MBR (Master Boot Record)
          S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
          Volumes:
            ORACLE:
              Capacity: 1.86 GB
              Available: 314.5 MB
              Writable: Yes
              File System: MS-DOS FAT16
              BSD Name: disk2s1
              Mount Point: /Volumes/ORACLE
          Volumes:
            disk2s1:
              Capacity: 1.86 GB
              Available: 314.5 MB
              Writable: Yes
              File System: MS-DOS FAT16

Craig

cap10subtext · Sep 17th, 2010, 10:05 PM

Thanks for the replies, will try this out.

cap10subtext · Sep 26th, 2010, 03:14 PM

@Stephanie and WCraig:
This nailed it, thanks so much for your help, it's exactly what I needed! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

	Quote:
	system_profiler SPUSBDataType \| grep -A 10 "Product ID: XxXXXX" \| grep "Serial Number"

And of course replacing XxXXXX with the ID of the key...