Serial Number

[David Henderson]

On 05/06/2011 02:13 PM, Harald Becker wrote:
>   Hallo David!
>
>> If I can gain access to the serial numbers of the drive, ...
> Serial number? ... do you mean the unique block device number? ... sorry
> if that may be confusing, a serial number is a strait counting number
> (1, 2, 3, ...) for me.
>
> ... looks like you are looking for the block device UUID feature ... may
> be the blockdev command can give you that information (I do not use this).
>
>> Perhaps a peek into your file might help as I'm also using mdev to
>> call an external script for processing.
> Sorry, I do not have an ready example for posting. It is just a simple
> and well known feature used in other shell programming technics too.
>
> A brief introduction ...
>
> At start of script, read stored variable values like:
> [ -f /dev/script/serial_number ]&&  source /dev/script/serial_number
>
> The variable name file may contain shell variable assignments, like:
> my_serial_number=4
>
> That variables my be used in your shell script:
> new_name="$base_name$(( ++my_serial_number ))"
> ... or any other form of shell variable substitution.
>
> At the end of the script, save new/changed variable values for later
> retrieval:
> echo "my_serial_number=$my_serial_number">/dev/script/serial_number
>
> That's it. May be modified to fit all types of simple information
> passing from one script invocation to next one. Feal free to ask for
> details.
>
> --
> Harald
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Thanks again for the continued help Harald.  When I was saying the 
serial number, I'm actually talking about the serial number for the 
drive/device itself.  This can be seen in /proc/scsi/usb-storage/*ID* 
file for USB devices (I have no idea how to obtain this information for 
internal SATA/IDE/SCSI drives) and is not the UUID of the drive (I can 
obtain that info via blkid).  The reason I'm trying to use serial 
numbers is because that information does NOT change between devices 
being plugged in and removed from computer.  It's a way to always 
reference a device file without fear of it changing (unlike /dev/sda1 
for example).  Unfortunately the lines above will not help either as 
those are not unique information to the drive and can change between 
devices being plugged in and removed.  Any other thoughts or methods to 
obtain serial numbers?

Dave