Listing all USB drives in Linux

Question

How can I get a list of removable drives (plugged into USB) in Linux? I'm fine with using KDE, GNOME or other DE libraries if it would make things easier.

Biphenyl

question should migrate to askubuntu – Collected

@Viswanathan: "Linux" isn't Ubuntu (which is, of course, why having a separate askubuntu site at all is stupid, but I digress) – Salvucci

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-* is all USB mass storage devices currently connected. – Lines

Is this a programming question? Because the answers so far are not programming-related. – Landaulet

This is not an Ubuntu specific question. I was looking for a programming library solution, but I can use something like Python os module to list the devices with Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams solution anyway. – Biphenyl

I'm am also writing a Python script that needs to find a particular USB drive. This seems like a perfectly reasonable place to ask and receive help on this matter. – Create

Found a similar question here https://mcmap.net/q/372156/-usb-devices-udev-and-d-bus – Create

@IgnacioVazquez-Abrams you should post your answer as a real answer – Homeopathist

use lsusb. and asking on linux forums, you will get more techniques – Loudish

@pistache: I did. A moderator deleted it. – Lines

Answer 1

I think a nice idea is to use udev interface from python.

Small example (of course in your case you have adjust some filtering):

In [1]: import pyudev
In [2]: pyudev.Context()
In [3]: ctx = pyudev.Context()
In [4]: list(ctx.list_devices(subsystem='usb'))
Out[4]: 
[Device(u'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb2'),
 Device(u'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb2/2-0:1.0'),
 Device(u'/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb2/2-2'),

It is a good way in most cases as new systems use udev.

Gropius

Answer 2

After all this time the question got unlocked again…

In the end I used UDisks via the D‐Bus interface like shown here.

Biphenyl

Answer 3

Sometime back i got this small script ( it's not mine ) but it surely helped me alot putting just for reference

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import usb.core
# find USB devices
dev = usb.core.find(find_all=True)
# loop through devices, printing vendor and product ids in decimal and hex
for cfg in dev:
      try:
              #print dir(cfg)
              sys.stdout.write('Decimal VendorID=' + str(cfg.idVendor) + ' & ProductID=' + str(cfg.bDeviceClass) + '  ' + str(cfg.product) + ' ' + str(cfg.bDeviceSubClass)+ '  ' + str(cfg.manufacturer)+'\n')
      except:
              print 

Lynwoodlynx

Answer 4

This is what I use from bash: lsblk --pairs --nodeps | grep 'RM="1"'

Sample output: NAME="sda" MAJ:MIN="8:0" RM="1" SIZE="59.5G" RO="0" TYPE="disk" MOUNTPOINT=""

Note it is listing the devices, not its partitions. If you like to see the partitions also, lsblk --pairs | grep 'RM="1"'

Caliber

Answer 5

Any reason not to just parse out the results from lsusb? I'm sure there are modules for this, but then again, easy is sometimes best.

I can't help you with Python, in Perl I might do:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @data;
foreach (`lsusb`) {
  next unless /Bus (\S+) Device (\S+): ID (\S+) (.*)/;
  push @data, { bus => $1, device => $2, id => $3, info => $4 };
}

use Data::Printer;
p @data;

which, on my computer, results in

[
    [0] {
        bus   005,
        device   001,
        id   "1d6b:0001",
        info   "Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub"
    },
    [1] {
        bus   004,
        device   001,
        id   "1d6b:0001",
        info   "Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub"
    },
    [2] {
        bus   003,
        device   001,
        id   "1d6b:0001",
        info   "Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub"
    },
    [3] {
        bus   002,
        device   001,
        id   "1d6b:0001",
        info   "Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub"
    },
    [4] {
        bus   001,
        device   003,
        id   "0bda:0158",
        info   "Realtek Semiconductor Corp. USB 2.0 multicard reader"
    },
    [5] {
        bus   001,
        device   002,
        id   "064e:a129",
        info   "Suyin Corp. "
    },
    [6] {
        bus   001,
        device   001,
        id   "1d6b:0002",
        info   "Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub"
    }
]

Note that Data::Printer and its p function are human-friendly object dumping for inspection purposes only.

Monograph

I am not good with perl but... I think a better way (generally) is to use the udev or some usb module for perl instead of parsing ls commands. – Gropius

Certainly both perl and python have modules for this purpose, still the output of lsusb is valid and gets the job done fast. As always, the level of rigor employed is up to the author and his/her task. – Monograph