15 Utilities, Scripts and Ways to Interrogate Your PC

6. lscpu

This command displays information about the CPU architecture.

Issuing the command lscpu displays information about all CPUs.

The information can be displayed in a table, lscpu --extended.

It’s also possible to show information about offline CPUs.

7. uname

Without any flags, uname might output just a single word, “Linux”. Not incredibly useful. But issue the command uname -a and you’ll get a very succinct system overview of the current machine and the operating system running on it.

The utility prints out the kernel name, network node hostname, the kernel release, the kernel version, the machine hardware name, the processor type, the hardware platform, and the operating system.

uname is one of the many excellent utilities provided by Coreutils, a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems.

8. dmesg

If your Linux system isn’t running systemd, you’ll probably need dmesg.

dmesg writes the kernel messages to standard output.

Examples of useful commands:

$ dmesg | less

$ dmesg | grep usb

$ dmesg -l emerg,alert,crit,err,warn

9. lshw

lshw lists detailed information about the hardware configurations. The utility should be run with root privileges.

There’s a GUI option available with the -X option; you’ll need lshw-gtk installed.

10. lspci

As the name suggests (ls – pci) this command lists all PCI devices on the system. In other words it displays information about PCI buses in the system and devices connected to them.

Besides the bare lspci command which shows a brief list of devices (shown in the image above), we can display additional information with the -v flag, dump the information in a readable form (lspci -vm), as well as display drivers and modules (lspci -k).

Next page: Page 3 – dmidecode, lsusb, lsscsi, /proc, /sys

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – inxi, Neofetch, CPU-X, journalctl, hwinfo
Page 2 – lscpu, uname, dmesg, lshw, lspci
Page 3 – dmidecode, lsusb, lsscsi, /proc, /sys