How do I get the serial number?

Question

Where can I find the serial number of the Raspberry Pi I am currently using?

Answer 1

The serial number can be found in /proc/cpuinfo; for example,

 pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
 Processor       : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
 BogoMIPS        : 697.95
 Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls
 CPU implementer : 0x41
 CPU architecture: 7
 CPU variant     : 0x0
 CPU part        : 0xb76
 CPU revision    : 7

 Hardware        : BCM2708
 Revision        : 1000002
 Serial          : 000000000000000d

Bash/Perl

In Bash, it is very simple to extract... by using Perl. Use

cat /proc/cpuinfo | perl -n -e '/^Serial[ ]*: ([0-9a-f]{16})$/ && print "$1\n"'

For example,

$ cat cpuinfo | perl -n -e '/^Serial[ ]*: ([0-9a-f]{16})$/ && print "$1\n"'
000000000000000d

Python

Raspberry Spy provide a very useful Python example.

def getserial():
  # Extract serial from cpuinfo file
  cpuserial = "0000000000000000"
  try:
    f = open('/proc/cpuinfo','r')
    for line in f:
      if line[0:6]=='Serial':
        cpuserial = line[10:26]
    f.close()
  except:
    cpuserial = "ERROR000000000"

  return cpuserial

References

1. Licence key product pages
2. Raspberry Spy: Getting Your Raspberry Pi Serial Number Using Python

Answer 2

Bash/Awk

Since this turned out to be some kind of "how many ways can you get the serial" here is the awk version

  awk '/^Serial\s*:\s/{print $3}' /proc/cpuinfo

Answer 3

Bash/Grep

Using grep:

grep -Po '^Serial\s*:\s*\K[[:xdigit:]]{16}' /proc/cpuinfo

Bash

Using pure Bash without using any external utilities:

pattern='^Serial.*([[:xdigit:]]{16})$'
while read -r line
do
    if [[ $line =~ $pattern ]]
    then
        echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
    fi
done < /proc/cpuinfo

The output of either of the above is the same.