How to view information on your Linux devices with lshw
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The lshw (list hardware) command on Linux systems provides a lot more information on system devices than most of us might imagine is available.
Kali Linux / nevarpp / Getty Images
While far from being one of the first 50 Linux commands anyone learns, the **lshw** command (read as “ls hardware”) can provide a lot of useful details on your system’s hardware.
It extracts details—maybe quite a few more than you knew were available—in a format that is reasonably easy to digest. Given descriptions, logical (device) names, sizes, etc., you are likely to appreciate how much detail you can access.
This post examines the information that **lshw** provides with a particular focus on disk and related hardware. Here is some sample **lshw** output:
Note that you should run the **lshw** command with **sudo** to ensure that you get all of the available details.
While we asked for “disk” in the above command (the output included shows only the first of five entries displayed), this particular output shows not a hard disk, but a card reader—another member of the disk class. Note that the system knows this device as **/dev/sdc**.
Similar details are provided on the primary disk on the system:
This disk is **/dev/sda**. The hard disks on this system both show up as **ATA** disks. **ATA** is a disk-drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself.
To get an abbreviated list of devices in the “disk” class, you can run a command like this one. Notice that two of the devices are listed twice, so we are still seeing five disk devices.
/0/100/1f.2/0 /dev/sda disk 120GB SSD2SC120G1CS175
/0/100/1f.2/1 /dev/cdrom disk DVD+-RW GSA-H73N
/0/100/1f.5/0.0.0 /dev/sdb disk 500GB SAMSUNG HE502HJ
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Hold onto your seat if you decide you want to see _**all**_ of the devices on a system. You will get a list that includes a lot more things than you probably normally think of as “devices”. Here’s an example—and this is the “short” (few details) list:
**NOTE:** The **awk** command selects the Class column from the **lshw** output using $0 (complete lines), but taking only the substrings that start in the correct place (column 36). None of the class entries have more than 13 letters so the substring ends there. The **tail -n +3** part of the command drops the heading and the “=====” line beneath it, so only the 14 device classes are included in the final listing.
One thing you’ll notice is that we get approximately 12 lines of output for each device in the disk class when we don’t use the **-short** option. We see the logical names, such as **/dev/sda**, disk sizes and types, etc.
The **lshw** command provides details that many of us won’t normally deal with. Still, it’s nice to know how much information is available even if you only use a portion of it.
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