Linux Commando: inxi: the Swiss Army knife for displaying Linux sysinfo

Do one thing and do it well - the Unix philosophy

inxi is the antithesis of the above venerable Unix philosophy. Many excellent tools exist for providing aspects of system and hardware information —lsb_release, uname, lshw, lscpu, lspci, lsusb, dmidecode, uptime, free, ip, parted, acpi, etc. Some of those tools may even report more details than inxi, but there is a definite advantage for using inxi—with just 1 command, you can see at a glance a machine's overall hardware and system configuration and real-time status.

System administrators and technical support engineers work with many machines, often at the same time. inxi enables them to quickly get a broad system configuration overview and assess the current machine status before doing maintenance or troubleshooting.

The tool organizes the machine data into the following categories:

System (hostname, kernel, 64-/32-bit, desktop…)
Machine (model, serial #, BIOS…)
CPU (model, speed…)
Graphics
Audio devices
Network devices
Drives
Partitions
USB devices
Sensors (temperatures, fan speed…)
Repositories
Real-time status (# processes, uptime…)

Installation

To install inxi on Debian buster,



# apt update && apt install inxi

Dependency checking

inxi calls numerous helper programs to do the actual work, not all of them may be pre-installed. Run the following inxi command (as non-root user) to test what is potentially missing on your system:



# inxi --recommends

-------------------------------------------------------

Test: recommended system programs:

...

ipmitool: -s IPMI sensors (servers)........... Missing

ipmi-sensors: -s IPMI sensors (servers)....... Missing

...

The following recommended system programs are missing:

Program: ipmitool ~ Install package: ipmitool

Program: ipmi-sensors ~ Install package: freeipmi-tools

...

-------------------------------------------------------

Note that the checking does not take into consideration whether your system actually supports the use of the helper programs. For instance, the 2 missing programs above (ipmitool and ipmi-sensors) only apply to servers. In this example, the target machine is not a server and does not support IPMI, so I did not install the recommended programs.

You must judge the merits of installing each helper program reported missing.

Usage

Root or non-root

You can run inxi as either root or a regular user. Certain output is restricted to root only, e.g., the motherboard serial number and detailed RAM data.

Basics

Although you can run inxi without any argument to get basic CPU and memory information, I'd recommend running it with -F.

-F is for Full, and is a shorthand for specifying all uppercase letter arguments (with some exceptions).

For instance, specifying -F automatically includes -P, but not -p. The uppercase argument -P shows partition information for the basic partitions: /, /boot, /home, etc. The lowercase letter argument -p includes snap partitions created when installing software using snap.



# inxi -Fxxxz

inxi output may contain IP addresses, MAC addresses, serial numbers—data that can uniquely identify the target system. If privacy is an issue, specify the -z flag to filter out private data from the report. Note that the default is to display the aforementioned data.

You can dial up the level of details in inxi output using the -x flag. Optionally specify up to 3 increasing levels of details: -x, -xx, and -xxx.

Advanced

If you want more details than what the -F option gives you, you can specify additional arguments to focus on specific aspects of your system.



# inxi -Fxmip -t --usb

The following is my favourite subset of the available arguments.

-d

inxi -F only displays data about hard disk drives. To include optical/DVD drives, specify -d.

-i

Default -F output hides the IP addresses for your network interfaces. To display IP, add -i.

-m

The -m argument reports data about individual memory slots.

-p

-F only reports standard partitions (/etc, /home, /opt…) and swap partitions. -p displays all mounted partitions, including partitions created by snap.

-r

This argument reports software package repository information.

-t

By default, -t displays the top 5 memory- and CPU-using processes. You can restrict to CPU or memory only, and adjust the number of processes reported. For instance, to display the top 10 memory-using processes, specify -tm10; top 10 CPU-using processes, -tc10.

Separate -t from other arguments(or add it to the end of an argument chain); otherwise inxi may return a syntax error.



# inxi -Fxmip -tc10

--usb

--usb displays USB device information.

Make it pretty

You can choose a color theme for inxi output. The argument is -c followed by a value between 0 and 42 inclusive, corresponding to the color theme.