I'm glad this topic came up, because I have a similar need.

What I don't see yet though, is a Mac OS X-based solution. I'm not much of a Mac guy, so I'm still digging around, but if anyone has an idea, I'd love to hear it.

Doug

d'oh! one more day of digging and I found the system_profiler -detailLevel -2 command in OS X 10.3.