I was recently building some preflight scripts and was looking to record some information about a machine live, before proceeding with a script. I found the cheapest way to determine information about architectures and chipsets when scripting preflight scripts for OS X to be the arch and machine commands respectively. For example, to verify the architecture is i386, use the arch command with no options: /usr/bin/arch Which simply outputs “i386”: i386 To check the machine type, simply use the machine command: /usr/bin/machine Which outputs as follows: x86_64h