Finding hardware in linux

10 Commands to Collect System and Hardware Info in Linux

It is always a good practice to know the hardware components of your Linux system is running on, this helps you to deal with compatibility issues when it comes to installing packages, drivers on your system using yum, dnf, or apt.

10 Commands to Check Hardware and System Information in Linux

Therefore in these tips and tricks series, we shall look at some useful commands that can help you to extract information about your Linux system and hardware components.

1. How to View Linux System Information

To know only the system name, you can use the uname command without any switch that will print system information or the uname -s command will print the kernel name of your system.

To view your network hostname, use the ‘-n’ switch with the uname command as shown.

To get information about kernel-version, use the ‘-v’ switch.

To get the information about your kernel release, use the ‘-r’ switch.

To print your machine hardware name, use the ‘-m’ switch:

All this information can be printed at once by running the ‘uname -a’ command as shown below.

2. How to View Linux System Hardware Information

Here you can use the lshw tool to gather vast information about your hardware components such as cpu, disks, memory, usb controllers, etc.

lshw is a relatively small tool and there are few options that you can use with it while extracting information. The information provided by lshw was gathered from different /proc files.

Note: Do remember that the lshw command is executed by the superuser (root) or sudo user.

To print information about your Linux system hardware, run this command.

You can print a summary of your hardware information by using the -short option.

If you wish to generate output as an html file, you can use the option -html.

Generate Linux Hardware Information in HTML

3. How to View Linux CPU Information

To view information about your CPU, use the lscpu command as it shows information about your CPU architecture such as a number of CPUs, cores, CPU family model, CPU caches, threads, etc from sysfs and /proc/cpuinfo.

4. How to Collect Linux Block Device Information

Block devices are storage devices such as hard disks, flash drives, etc. lsblk command is used to report information about block devices as follows.

If you want to view all block devices on your system then include the -a option.

5. How to Print USB Controllers Information

The lsusb command is used to report information about USB controllers and all the devices that are connected to them.

You can use the -v option to generate detailed information about each USB device.

6. How to Print PCI Devices Information

PCI devices may include usb ports, graphics cards, network adapters, etc. The lspci tool is used to generate information concerning all PCI controllers on your system plus the devices that are connected to them.

To print information about PCI devices run the following command.

Use the -t option to produce output in a tree format.

Use the -v option to produce detailed information about each connected device.

7. How to Print SCSI Devices Information

To view all your scsi/sata devices, use the lsscsi command as follows. If you do not have the lsscsi tool installed, run the following command to install it.

After installation, run the lsscsi command as shown:

Use the -s option to show device sizes.

8. How to Print Information about SATA Devices

You can find some information about sata devices on your system as follows using the hdparm utility. In the example below, I used the block device /dev/sda1 which is the hard disk on my system.

To print information about device geometry in terms of cylinders, heads, sectors, size, and the starting offset of the device, use the -g option.

9. How to Check Linux File System Information

To gather information about file system partitions, you can use the fdisk command. Although the main functionality of the fdisk command is to modify file system partitions, it can also be used to view information about the different partitions on your file system.

You can print partition information as follows. Remember to run the command as a superuser or else you may not see any output.

10. How to Check Linux Hardware Components Info

You can also use the dmidecode utility to extract hardware information by reading data from the DMI tables.

To print information about memory, run this command as a superuser.

To print information about the system, run this command.

To print information about BIOS, run this command.

To print information about the processor, run this command.

Summary

There are many other ways you can use to obtain information about your system hardware components. Most of these commands use files in the /proc directory to extract system information.

Hope you find these tips and tricks useful and remember to post a comment in case you want to add more information to this or if you face any difficulties in using any of the commands. Remember to always stay connected to Tecmint.

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16 Commands to Check Hardware Information on Linux

Hardware information

Like for every thing, there are plenty of commands to check information about the hardware of your linux system.

Some commands report only specific hardware components like cpu or memory while the rest cover multiple hardware units.

This post takes a quick look at some of the most commonly used commands to check information and configuration details about various hardware peripherals and devices.

The list includes lscpu, hwinfo, lshw, dmidecode, lspci etc.

1. lscpu

The lscpu command reports information about the cpu and processing units. It does not have any further options or functionality.

2. lshw — List Hardware

A general purpose utility, that reports detailed and brief information about multiple different hardware units such as cpu, memory, disk, usb controllers, network adapters etc. Lshw extracts the information from different /proc files.

Check out the following post to learn more about lshw

3. hwinfo — Hardware Information

Hwinfo is another general purpose hardware probing utility that can report detailed and brief information about multiple different hardware components, and more than what lshw can report.

4. lspci — List PCI

The lspci command lists out all the pci buses and details about the devices connected to them.
The vga adapter, graphics card, network adapter, usb ports, sata controllers, etc all fall under this category.

Filter out specific device information with grep.

5. lsscsi — List scsi devices

Lists out the scsi/sata devices like hard drives and optical drives.

6. lsusb — List usb buses and device details

This command shows the USB controllers and details about devices connected to them. By default brief information is printed. Use the verbose option «-v» to print detailed information about each usb port

On the above system, 1 usb port is being used by the mouse.

7. Inxi

Inxi is a 10K line mega bash script that fetches hardware details from multiple different sources and commands on the system, and generates a beautiful looking report that non technical users can read easily.

8. lsblk — List block devices

List out information all block devices, which are the hard drive partitions and other storage devices like optical drives and flash drives

9. df — disk space of file systems

Reports various partitions, their mount points and the used and available space on each.

10. Pydf — Python df

An improved df version written in python, that displays colored output that looks better than df

11. fdisk

Fdisk is a utility to modify partitions on hard drives, and can be used to list out the partition information as well.

12. mount

The mount is used to mount/unmount and view mounted file systems.

Again, use grep to filter out only those file systems that you want to see

13. free — Check RAM

Check the amount of used, free and total amount of RAM on system with the free command.

14. dmidecode

The dmidecode command is different from all other commands. It extracts hardware information by reading data from the SMBOIS data structures (also called DMI tables).

Check out the man page for more details.

15. /proc files

Many of the virtual files in the /proc directory contain information about hardware and configurations. Here are some of them

16. hdparm

The hdparm command gets information about sata devices like hard disks.

Summary

Each of the command has a slightly different method of extracting information, and you may need to try more than one of them, while looking for specific hardware details. However they are available across most linux distros, and can be easily installed from the default repositories.

On the desktop there are gui tools, for those who do not want to memorise and type commands. Hardinfo, I-nex are some of the popular ones that provide detailed information about multiple different hardware components.

A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected] .

48 thoughts on “ 16 Commands to Check Hardware Information on Linux ”

How i can check memory in CPU. Example OPT, Efuse

Thanks for this. I’m just getting going on a VPS and this helped me discover they’d not given me the extra 1Gb I ordered. Very well explained.

Super happy with
inxi -Fx

more accurate than some of the other utilities.. for instance hwinfo was inaccurate for my Lenovo

Thanks for the great post!

Thank you! Your descriptions were useful and well explained!

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How to Get Hardware Info on Linux

The commands mentioned in this article have been run on a Debian 10 Buster system but they can be replicated easily on most Linux distros.

We will be using the Debian command line, the Terminal, to fetch all the hardware information. You can open the Terminal application by entering the keywords ‘Terminal’ in the Application Launcher search as follows:

Use the Super/Windows key to access the Application Launcher.

Fetching Basic System Information through the Uname Command

The uname command, short for unix name, in Linux is used to print operating system and hardware information through the command line. Here is the syntax of the uname command:

By using various option switches with the command, you can choose to print either all or some specific information about your system.

The default behavior of the uname command

When you use the uname command without any switch, it prints the Linux Kernel name running on your system. Here is how you would use the command:

You can see how the uname command prints my Kernel name, which is Linux.

Printing Kernel Name through uname

Now, if you particularly want the uname command to print the Kernel name, you can use the -s switch with the command as follows:

We need to use the -s option in the scenario where we want to print the Kernel name along with some other information by using more than one switch.

Printing Kernel Release through uname

If you want the uname command to print the Kernel release you are using, you can use the -r switch with the command as follows:

You can see how the output prints the release number of the Linux kernel I am running.

Printing Kernel Version through uname

If you want the uname command to print the Kernel version you are using, you can use the v switch with the command as follows:

You can see how the output prints the version number of the Linux kernel I am running.

Printing Machine Hardware Name through uname

Using the -m switch with the uname command prints the hardware name of your machine.

This lets you know the hardware architecture of your system.

If you see x86_64 as the output, you are using a 64-bit machine. The output i686 indicates that you are using a 32-bit architecture.

Printing Network Node Hostname through uname

Using the -n switch with the uname command prints the node name/hostname of your system. The hostname is the identification that a system uses to communicate on a network.

The output of the uname command with the -n switch is the same as that of the ‘hostname’ command.

Printing Processor Type through uname

You can use the uname command as follows with the -p switch in order to print the processor type:

The above command did not produce a valid output on my Debian but it gives accurate information on Ubuntu.

Printing Hardware Platform through uname

The uname command with the -i switch is used to print the hardware platform you are on.

The above command also did not produce a valid output on my Debian but it gives accurate information on Ubuntu.

Printing Operating System name through uname

The uname command with the -o switch prints the operating system name that you are running.

The output of this command is GNU/Linux on all Linux distros.

Printing All the above information through uname

If you want the uname command to print all the information mentioned above, you can of course use the command with all the switches. The simple way, however, is to use only the -a switch with the uname command as follows:

You can see how the output displays all the information we have printed above, one by one.

Fetch Detailed Hardware Information

In this section, we will explain some more commands through which you can print a complete picture of your hardware specifications and also that of some individual hardware components.

Fetching Hardware Picture through the lshw command

Lshw, short for list hardware, is a command line utility that is used to print information about the hardware components of your system. It fetches information like CPU type & speed, disks, memory, bus speed, firmware, cache, etc, from the /proc files. If your system does not have this utility installed by default, you can install it through the following command as an administrator:

You can then fetch a detailed hardware report through the following command:

Running the command as sudo gives you access to the confidential information about the system.

If you are looking for a summary of the above information, you can get it through the following lshw usage:

You can see how the command prints a better readable hardware profile in a column-wise format.

You can print the output of the lshw command to an html file for sharing or for later use.

Run the following command as sudo in order to do so:

The html is saved in the current user’s home folder by default and this is how it looks like:

Fetching CPU Information through lscpu

The lscpu command fetches detailed CPU information from the /proc/cpuinfo and sysfs files. This is the exact command you will be using:

Fetching Block Device Information through lsblk

The lsblk command fetches detailed block device information such as your hard drives, flash drives, and their partitions. This is the exact command you will be using:

For even more information, you can use the following command:

Fetching USB Controllers Information through lsusb

The lsusb command fetches and prints detailed USB controllers information along with the connected hardware. This is the exact command you will be using:

For even more information, you can use the following command:

Here are some of the other commands you can use to get information about a particular kind of device:

Command	Information
$ lspci	Fetch information about PCI devices connected to your system
$ lsscsi	Fetch information about SCSI devices connected to your system
$ hdparm [device_location]	Fetch information about SATA devices connected to your system. For example, use the command $ hdparm /dev/sda1 for information about sda 1

This was all you needed to know about printing all or specific system and hardware information on your Linux.

About the author

Karim Buzdar

Karim Buzdar holds a degree in telecommunication engineering and holds several sysadmin certifications. As an IT engineer and technical author, he writes for various web sites. He blogs at LinuxWays.

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