The lshw command (list hardware) is a powerful utility in Linux used to display detailed information about the hardware configuration of your system. It can provide comprehensive details about various hardware components, including CPU, memory, disk drives, network interfaces, and more.

Basic Hardware Information

To get a general overview of your system's hardware, you can run lshw without any options. This will produce a detailed, hierarchical report.

# lshw
# Information about hardware configuration

# Generate full information report about all detected hardware.
lshw

Short Hardware Summary

For a more concise summary, use the -short option. This is useful for quickly identifying key hardware components.

# Display brief hardware information.
lshw -short

Specific Hardware Class Information

You can filter the output to display information about specific hardware classes. For example, to view memory details:

# Display only memory information.
lshw -short -class memory

To display processor information:

# Display processor information.
lshw -class processor

To list disk drives:

# Display the disk drives with the disk class.
lshw -short -class disk

To get information about disks, storage controllers, and volumes:

# Display information about the partitions and controllers also, specify the
# storage and volume class along with the disk class.
lshw -short -class disk -class storage -class volume

To view network adapter details:

# Network adapter information.
lshw -class network

Bus Information

The -businfo option displays the address details of various devices, such as PCI, USB, SCSI, and IDE devices.

# Display the address details of PCI, USB, SCSI and IDE devices.
lshw -businfo

Generating Reports

lshw can also generate reports in different formats, which is useful for documentation or sharing hardware information.

# Generate report in HTML format.
lshw -html > hardware.html

# Generate report in XML format.
lshw -xml > hardware.xml

External Resources

• lshw man page
• Linux Hardware Information with lshw
• lshw on Wikipedia