15 Utilities, Scripts and Ways to Interrogate Your PC

11. dmidecode

dmidecode displays the DMI (alternatively known as SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. You’ll need root privileges to use this utility.

The tool can display entries of a given type: bios, system, baseboard, chassis, processor, memory, cache, connector, and slot. Here’s the system entry.

12. lsusb

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard.

lsusb is a utility for displaying information about USB buses in the system and the devices connected to them. It uses udev’s hardware database to associate a full human-readable name to the vendor ID and the product ID.

13. lsscsi

lsscsi is a tool that lists SCSI devices and NVMe devices. While some SCSI devices are long forgotten, hard drives and solid state disks and DVD drives continue to use a modified SCSI. This utility therefore still remains useful.

The tool uses information in sysfs (Linux kernel series 2.6 and later) to list SCSI devices (or hosts) currently attached to the system. Many non-SCSI storage devices (but not all) use the SCSI subsystem in Linux.

14. /proc

/proc is sometimes known as a process information pseudo-file system. It contains runtime system information (e.g. system memory, devices mounted, hardware configuration, etc). Each of the numbered subdirectories corresponds to an actual process ID. Looking at the process table, you can match processes with the associated process ID.

It’s a virtual filesystem that doesn’t store ‘real’ files. Almost all files in this directory have a file size of 0.

Some utilities (such as lsmod, lspci) simply relay the information from this directory. It’s important not to edit the non-zero files, but you can view them using a text viewer.

15. /sys

/sys is a virtual filesystem. It provides a set of virtual files by exporting information about various kernel subsystems, hardware devices and associated device drivers from the kernel’s device model to user space.

Again you don’t want to be trying to edit anything here.

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