Best way to get machine id on Linux

Best way to get machine id on Linux

Best way to get machine id on Linux?
Depending on your kernel, the DMI information may be available via sysfs. Try those:

cat /sys/class/dmi/id/board_serial

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid

xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
or using a tool

dmidecode -s baseboard-serial-number

…

dmidecode -s system-uuid

…

On modern machines with systemd: machine id is created by systemd-machine-id-setup. The location of machine id is documented - in freedesktop machine-id and man machine-id and machine id has a more standardized format - see RFC4122. Just:

cat /etc/machine-id

You can use lshal. This needs hal (apt-get install hal or yum install hal) to be installed first. This way you can access all the info of dmidecode without root permissions.

A non-root equivalent of

dmidecode | grep -i uuid

will be

$ lshal |grep -i system.hardware.uuid
And similarly other info as per your needs.