lshw vs blockdev

[barak]

Thanks for writing this script, it is really quite useful.

One very minor suggestion. For Linux, the lshw utility is not always installed, and is also very slow. (The slowness is due to fetching all sorts of non-block-device-related info, which is then filtered out in this script by grep /dev.) The "approved" alternative would be blockdev, which (at least on Debian and derivatives thereof like Ubuntu) is in an essential package and therefore guaranteed present. It is also about 200x faster.

$ sudo time --format 'real %e' blockdev --report > /dev/null
real 0.01

$ sudo time --format 'real %e' lshw > /dev/null
real 1.83                 

You can get a list of all available block devices with blockdev --report and you can get the physical sector size of a single device with, e.g., blockdev --getpbsz /dev/sda.

[barak]

PS, the natural language device model description can be snarfed directly,

$ cat /sys/block/sda/device/model 
SAMSUNG SSD PM81

[JElchison]

Hi @barak, thanks for your suggestion. I've implemented your recommended change. Please review/test #6. If it meets your approval, I'll close #5 and and merge #6.

n.b. blockdev is not available by default on OS X (nor is the /sys/ pseudo-file system).

[barak]

Seems to work!

[JElchison]

Many thanks, @barak !