Using udev I have been able to get this information for a certain USB device:
idVendor: 13b1
idProduct: 0018
manufacturer:
product: USB 2.0 Network Adapter ver.2
serial: 00FFFF
Now I want to get the full strings that are associated with the vendor and product ids. I found that the file /usr/share/misc/usb.ids
contains the information that I'm looking for:
13b1 Linksys
000b WUSB11 v4.0 802.11b Adapter
000d WUSB54G Wireless Adapter
0011 WUSB54GP v4.0 802.11g Adapter
0018 USB200M 10/100 Ethernet Adapter
001a HU200TS Wireless Adapter
001e WUSBF54G 802.11bg
0020 WUSB54GC 802.11g Adapter [ralink rt73]
0023 WUSB54GR
0024 WUSBF54G v1.1 802.11bg
However, it's not clear to me how I should retrieve this data in my application. Is there an API available or should I just parse the file? If I choose to parse it, then is /usr/share/misc/usb.ids
always going to be the correct location?
Go to Control Panel > Device Manager and find your USB device. Double click the device or right click and select Properties. Go to the Details tab and select Hardware ID to view its PID and VID.
To find the vendor id and product id of a device we can use the command "usb-devices" . The command lists out details of all the usb busses in the system and if any device is connected to any of the bus, it gives information of that device.
In the 'Computer Management' select 'Device Manager'. Expand 'Universal Serial Bus controllers' and make a double click onto your USB device. Select 'Details' tab and select 'Hardware IDs'. The red marked numbers in the screenshot are the USB Vendor and Product ID.
The USB Vendor and product information (idVendor and idProduct) are displayed in the viewing window on the right-hand side.
lsusb
command queries information about currently plugged USB devices. You can use its -d
option to query a certain vendor/product (but it seems to work only for currently plugged devices):
$ lsusb -d 0e21:0750
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0e21:0750 Cowon Systems, Inc.
You can show information for all devices:
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0421:01c7 Nokia Mobile Phones
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0e21:0750 Cowon Systems, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 002: ID 046d:c01b Logitech, Inc. MX310 Optical Mouse
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
You can also make it be verbose (lsusb -v
) and printing a lot of stuff.
Note that when accessing information about the system in Linux OS, it's much preferred to do it via shell commands (such as lsusb
) than to directly parse the system files these commands access.
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