Find Mac OSX serial number

How to find the Mac OSX serial number.

Sometimes it is required to get serial number of a mac, and you validate on that.

I needed the same, few years back, when I developed a plugin for OsiriX. I was asked to release it in such a way, only few systems can use that plugin.

If we get any better solution than this, that will be quite helpful for all of us.

The following code is mainly copied from Technical Note TN1103, with small modifications to return an NSString and to make it compile with ARC:

#include <IOKit/IOKitLib.h>

- (NSString *)getSerialNumber
{
    NSString *serial = nil;
    io_service_t platformExpert = IOServiceGetMatchingService(kIOMasterPortDefault,
                                     IOServiceMatching("IOPlatformExpertDevice"));
    if (platformExpert) {
        CFTypeRef serialNumberAsCFString =
        IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperty(platformExpert,
                                        CFSTR(kIOPlatformSerialNumberKey),
                                        kCFAllocatorDefault, 0);
        if (serialNumberAsCFString) {
            serial = CFBridgingRelease(serialNumberAsCFString);
        }

        IOObjectRelease(platformExpert);
    }
    return serial;
}

You have to add the IOKit.framework to your build settings.