Differences in the Mac system_profiler

Question

I am using system_profiler to view the USB hardware details connected to a Mac, however there are some differences between running this on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. For example, in 10.5 the keys for various attributes have an alphabet letter prefix. More importantly, I can't get the location_id attribute (in the SPUSBDataType dataType) in 10.4. Any ideas on why this difference exists and ways to work around it?

Answer 1

Have you tried using ioreg? I don't have access to 10.4 but since ioreg is lower level, it might be a better approach for what you're trying to achieve.

ioreg -l -n IOSerialBSDClient