Getting hard drive serial number from USB devices

[Madison Kelly]

   For the record/interest, here is the code that gets the IDE hard 
drive's serial number:

-=-=-=-=-
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use FileHandle;

my $dev="hda";

my $read_id = new FileHandle;
if ( $read_id->open("< /proc/ide/$dev/identify") )
{
	print "This appears to be an IDE disk.\n";
}
else
{
	die "I can't read any devices for: [$dev]\n";
}

<$read_id>;
my $sn = substr(<$read_id>,10,29).substr(<$read_id>,0,20);
$sn=~s/2020//g;
$sn =~ s/\ //g;
my $serial;
$serial.=chr(hex $_) foreach (unpack("a2" x 20,$sn));
print "The serial number of device: [$dev] is: [$serial].\n";
$read_id->close;
exit(0);
-=-=-=-=-

Sample output:

# ./test.pl
This appears to be an IDE disk.
The serial number of device: [hda] is: [3LF00S4C].
-=-=-=-=-

   I am not sure how reliable it is to use '/proc' though... I have a 
vague recollection that '/proc' was being phased out? If possible, I'd 
rather query a device directly.

Madison

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           Madison Kelly (Digimer)
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