I’d been figuring out a way to find the mount points and their serial numbers for USB attached to the machine. So I decided to write a bash script which should return the details for multiple USB devices in a pipe (|) separated format.
/media/E4BC-1A90 : 2008012411263424 | /media/Transcend : 0008012411263424
|________________|__________________|
mount point Serial Number
Lets do it…
JFYI, There are many commands available in Linux to find all the mounted devices on your computer but the one we are going to use is ‘df’ which basically reports file system disk space usage. Here is what you get after running the command in Terminal.
amit@codef0rmer:/var/www/side-projects/usbsData$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 49213248 18053208 28660100 39% /
udev 1001524 4 1001520 1% /dev
tmpfs 404564 992 403572 1% /run
none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
none 1011404 2592 1008812 1% /run/shm
/dev/sda6 185319436 38757044 137148660 23% /home/dev/sdb1 2058296 4 2058292 1% /media/E4BC-1A90
Now we’ll have to parse the output of the above command to extract only external devices mounted which IMO, mount into /media/ directory always, and store the locations into an array for further use.
# Fetching usbs location and putting them in array
locIterator="0"
locArr=()
while read row
do
loc=$( echo $row | grep -P '/media/.*?$' -o )
if [ "$loc" != "" ]; then
locArr[ $locIterator ]="$loc"
(( locIterator++ ))
fi
done < <(df)
There are many commands to fetch the serial number and other details of the devices as well but I found this command suitable in this case. Here we are concatenating the content of multiple files generated after mounting the external devices using ‘cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage/*’ command.
# Fetching usbs serial numbers and putting them in array
snIterator="0"
snArr=()
while read row
do
sn=$( echo $row | grep -P 'Serial Number:.*?$' -o )
if [ "$sn" != "" ]; then
snArr[ $snIterator ]="${sn:15}"
(( snIterator++ ))
fi
done < <(cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage/*)
Finally, we are going to loop through the first array and merge its elements with that of the second array, so we’ll get the desire output (see the starting of the blog post).
# Generating Output by looping through the both arrays
output=""
for (( i = 0 ; i < ${#locArr[@]} ; i++ ))
do
if [ "$i" != "0" ]; then
output="$output|"
fi
output="$output${locArr[$i]}: ${snArr[$i]}"
done
echo $output
Voila!
Run the script in a terminal `$ bash ./usb.sh`, please do not use `sh` instead of bash as you may get some belligerent errors 😉 and of course you can download the code from github.
Last but not the least, there are many ways to achieve the same thing and no program is 100% perfect so feel free to comment If you think we can make this bash script better. Good night! |-)
Its always better to hack around than... 