Easy way to detect hard drives and partitions in Linux

[RunLevelZero]

I need a way to detect hard drives and their partitions... labels would
be nice too... I did some googling but did not find anything all too
useful. This will strictly be on Linux / Unix so any help would be
greatly appreciated.

TIA

[Peter Hansen]

RunLevelZero wrote:

I need a way to detect hard drives and their partitions... labels would
be nice too... I did some googling but did not find anything all too
useful. This will strictly be on Linux / Unix so any help would be
greatly appreciated.

os.popen('/sbin/sfdisk -l /dev/hda') etc... ?

Or reading from /proc/ide and friends?

[Jeff Epler]

You're not going to find a single portable "unix" way of doing this.
The format of /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab are pretty portable, but they
only list mountable/mounted partitions, not all partitions.

In addition to the linux possibilities mentioned in another reply, there
is also /proc/partitions. Finally, if you only want to recognize
FDISK.EXE-type partitions (used by many types of Linux, though that
seems to be changing in Fedora Core 4), it shouldn't be hard to write a
Python program to read the partition table directly from the disk. The
details will be readily available online.

Jeff

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[RunLevelZero]

Jeff Epler wrote:

You're not going to find a single portable "unix" way of doing this.
The format of /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab are pretty portable, but they
only list mountable/mounted partitions, not all partitions.

In addition to the linux possibilities mentioned in another reply, there
is also /proc/partitions. Finally, if you only want to recognize
FDISK.EXE-type partitions (used by many types of Linux, though that
seems to be changing in Fedora Core 4), it shouldn't be hard to write a
Python program to read the partition table directly from the disk. The
details will be readily available online.

Jeff

Well thanks for the responses and so quickly. I'm very new to
programming and am not afraid to say it. I'll see what I can come up
with. at least this is a good start.

Thanks.