Inventory Your Machines with a One-liner

The command dmidecode dumps the DMI table from your machines BIOS in human readable text. Depending on your machine, this should contain some really useful info. Basically a total hardware profile on most machines, including info like service tags and model numbers. I recently needed to quickly inventory a bunch of Dell servers and came up with this one-liner that will production a CSV line of text for the machine it's run on. Combine these lines of text into one file and import into Excel, inventory done.

Format is:
'Hostname','Distro-Release Version','UUID','Service Tag','Model','Processor Version','Memory'

echo `hostname` , `cat /etc/*-release` , `dmidecode |egrep UUID |sed "s/\s\+UUID: //"` , `dmidecode -s system-serial-number` , `dmidecode -s system-product-name` , `dmidecode -s processor-version` , `dmesg |egrep Mem |awk '{ print $2; }'`

Now of course you'll need to modify this command for your own hardware, this won't even work for every Dell. But, the output of dmidecode is readable enough to just scan through it and figure out what you need. Also look in /proc/ for other info you might want to add to your inventory.