lsusb on OS X
Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 10:12
Jay Kickliter

I’ve starting down the long dark path of embedded USB design. It’s been tough, but there are some good examples out there.

But back to the subject of this post. I find it annoying to have to go to About This Mac every time I want to see what USB devices are connected. I would like an equivelent of the Linux command line tool lsusb. Then I read somewhere the OS X command system_profiler SPUSBDataType gives you the same data that you will find in About This Mac. To make it easy to remember, I added this line to my bash profile (~/.profile):

alias lsusb='system_profiler SPUSBDataType'

Now, all I have to do is type lsusb in the terminal to list all the USB devices connected to my computer. I’m sure it is possible to install the actual lsusb command on my computer, but this works fine for me.

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