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.

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.

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 .

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 

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"'

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.