Find all storage devices attached to a Linux machine

Question

I have a need to find all of the writable storage devices attached to a given machine, whether or not they are mounted.

The dopey way to do this would be to try every entry in /dev that corresponds to a writable devices (hd* and sd*).

Is there a better solution, or should I stick with this one?

Answer 1

Use libsysfs, the recommended way to query the kernel about attached devices of all kinds.

Answer 2

Modern linux systems will normally only have entries in /dev for devices that exist, so going through hda* and sda* as you suggest would work fairly well.

Otherwise, there may be something in /proc you can use. From a quick look in there, I'd have said /proc/partitions looks like it could do what you need.

Answer 3

ls /sys/block

Answer 4

libsysfs does look potentially useful, but not directly from a shell script. There's a program that comes with it called systool which will do what you want, though it may be easier to just look in /sys directly rather than using another program to do it for you.

Answer 5

/proc/partitions will list all the block devices and partitions that the system recognizes. You can then try using "file -s <device>" to determine what kind of filesystem is present on the partition, if any.

Answer 6

Using HAL (kernel 2.6.17 and up):

#! /bin/bash
hal-find-by-property --key volume.fsusage --string filesystem |
while read udi ; do
    # ignore optical discs
    if [[ "$(hal-get-property --udi $udi --key volume.is_disc)" == "false" ]]; then
        dev=$(hal-get-property --udi $udi --key block.device)   
        fs=$(hal-get-property --udi $udi --key volume.fstype) 
        echo $dev": "$fs
    fi 
done