Utility to give system info about a Mac

gistfile1.sc

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# Little command-line utility for telling you stuff about your Mac without
# having to click around all over the place. Originally found here and 
# then cleaned up significantly: http://gist.github.com/1617
#
import sys
import commands
import plistlib

SYSTEM_KEYS = {
    'machine_name': 'Machine Name',
    'machine_model': 'Model',
    'serial_number': 'Serial Number',
    'physical_memory': 'Physical RAM',
    'number_processors': 'Number of CPUs',
    'current_processor_speed': 'CPU Speed',
    'SMC_version': 'SMC Version',
    'boot_rom_version': 'Boot ROM Version',
    'l2_cache': 'L2 Cache',
#    'spdisplays_rom-revision': 'GPU ROM Version',
}

def main():
    in_profile = commands.getstatusoutput('system_profiler -xml')
    if len(in_profile) < 2:
        sys.stderr.write("Error generating system profile!\n")
        sys.exit(1)
    parsed = plistlib.readPlistFromString(in_profile[1])
    d = parsed[0].items()[5][1][0]
    print '\n'.join(["%20s: %s" % (k, v) 
                     for (k, v) in [(label, d[key]) 
                                    for key, label in SYSTEM_KEYS.items() 
                                    if key in d]])
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()