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:
$ sudo lshw -C disk
*-disk:0
description: SCSI Disk
product: Card Reader-1
vendor: JIE LI
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sdc
version: 1.00
capabilities: removable
configuration: logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
*-medium
physical id: 0
logical name: /dev/sdc
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:
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: SSD2SC120G1CS175
physical id: 0
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda <==
version: 1101
serial: PNY20150000778410606
size: 111GiB (120GB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=
f63b5929
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.
$ sudo lshw -short -C disk H/W path Device Class Description ============================================================= /0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.0 /dev/sdc disk Card Reader-1 /0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.0/0 /dev/sdc disk /0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.1 /dev/sdd disk 2 /0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.1/0 /dev/sdd disk /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
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:
$ sudo lshw -short
[sudo] password for shs:
H/W path Device Class Description
=============================================================
system Inspiron 530s
/0 bus 0RY007
/0/0 memory 128KiB BIOS
/0/4 processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU
/0/4/a memory 32KiB L1 cache
/0/4/b memory 6MiB L2 cache
/0/24 memory 6GiB System Memory
/0/24/0 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667
/0/24/1 memory 1GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667
/0/24/2 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667
/0/24/3 memory 1GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667
/0/1 generic
/0/10 generic
/0/11 generic
/0/12 generic
/0/13 generic
/0/14 generic
/0/15 generic
/0/17 generic
/0/18 generic
/0/19 generic
/0/2 generic
/0/20 generic
/0/100 bridge 82G33/G31/P35/P31 Express DRAM
/0/100/1 bridge 82G33/G31/P35/P31 Express PCI
/0/100/1/0 display Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/84
/0/100/1/0.1 multimedia Caicos HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6
/0/100/19 enp0s25 network 82562V-2 10/100 Network Connec
/0/100/1a bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI
/0/100/1a/1 usb3 bus UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1a.1 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI
/0/100/1a.1/1 usb4 bus UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1a.1/1/2 input Rock Candy Wireless Keyboard
/0/100/1a.2 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI
/0/100/1a.2/1 usb5 bus UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1a.2/1/2 input USB OPTICAL MOUSE
/0/100/1a.7 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI
/0/100/1a.7/1 usb1 bus EHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1b multimedia 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio
/0/100/1d bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI
/0/100/1d/1 usb6 bus UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1d/1/1 scsi4 storage CD04
/0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.0 /dev/sdc disk Card Reader-1
/0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.0/0 /dev/sdc disk
/0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.1 /dev/sdd disk 2
/0/100/1d/1/1/0.0.1/0 /dev/sdd disk
/0/100/1d.1 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI
/0/100/1d.1/1 usb7 bus UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1d.2 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI
/0/100/1d.2/1 usb8 bus UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1d.7 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI
/0/100/1d.7/1 usb2 bus EHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1d.7/1/2 multimedia USB Live camera
/0/100/1e bridge 82801 PCI Bridge
/0/100/1e/1 communication HSF 56k Data/Fax Modem
/0/100/1f bridge 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface
/0/100/1f.2 scsi0 storage 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 4
/0/100/1f.2/0 /dev/sda disk 120GB SSD2SC120G1CS175
/0/100/1f.2/0/1 /dev/sda1 volume 111GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/1 /dev/cdrom disk DVD+-RW GSA-H73N
/0/100/1f.3 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Con
/0/100/1f.5 scsi3 storage 82801I (ICH9 Family) 2 port SA
/0/100/1f.5/0.0.0 /dev/sdb disk 500GB SAMSUNG HE502HJ
/0/100/1f.5/0.0.0/1 /dev/sdb1 volume 433GiB EXT4 volume
/0/3 system PnP device PNP0c02
/0/5 system PnP device PNP0b00
/0/6 storage PnP device PNP0700
/0/7 system PnP device PNP0c02
/0/8 system PnP device PNP0c02
/0/9 system PnP device PNP0c01
Run a command like this to list device classes and count how many devices are in each class.
$ sudo lshw -short | awk ‘{print substr($0,36,13)}’ | tail -n +3 | sort | uniq -c
4 bridge
18 bus
1 communication
7 disk
1 display
12 generic
2 input
8 memory
3 multimedia
1 network
1 processor
4 storage
6 system
2 volume
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.
$ sudo lshw -C disk
[sudo] password for shs:
*-disk:0
description: SCSI Disk
product: Card Reader-1 card reader?
vendor: JIE LI
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sdc
version: 1.00
capabilities: removable
configuration: logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
*-medium
physical id: 0
logical name: /dev/sdc
*-disk:1
description: SCSI Disk
product: 2
vendor: AC4100 -
physical id: 0.0.1
bus info: scsi@4:0.0.1
logical name: /dev/sdd
capabilities: removable
configuration: logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
*-medium
physical id: 0
logical name: /dev/sdd
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: SSD2SC120G1CS175
physical id: 0
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda main system disk
version: 1101
serial: PNY20150000778410606
size: 111GiB (120GB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=f63b5929
*-cdrom aka /dev/sr0
description: DVD writer
product: DVD+-RW GSA-H73N
vendor: HL-DT-ST
physical id: 1
bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/cdrom
logical name: /dev/cdrw
logical name: /dev/dvd
logical name: /dev/dvdrw
logical name: /dev/sr0
version: B103
serial: [
capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r
configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: SAMSUNG HE502HJ
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@3:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sdb secondary disk
version: 0002
serial: S2B6J90B501053
size: 465GiB (500GB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=7e67ccf3
Wrap-up
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.
Copyright © 2020 IDG Communications, Inc.
