There’s plenty of times you can need the serial number (aka Service Tag) from a Dell machine, but not be able to physically look at the label. It’s a server in a datacenter, it’s your laptop and it’s on a dock, etc, etc. Fortunately, there are easy commands to get the serial number right from the command line in both Windows and Linux.

Windows:

From a command prompt, type:

wmic bios get serialnumber

Linux (Ubuntu and others):

From a terminal, type:

sudo dmidecode -s system-serial-number

Comments are welcome, as always.