How to create a program code that scans for usb sticks inserted in usb ports

[cyrilschreiber]

Hello guys,

I'm searching for a way to check for a usb devices and execute a script when a new usb device is inserted.

Does someone know how to do that ?

[Origami Cactus]

Specifiying your programming language would certainly help

[WWicket]

Will also depend on OS. 

 

For Linux, you'd make a udev rule to trigger off of... If you want to trigger on any USB device being connected:

ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="****", ATTRS{idProduct}=="****", RUN+= "path_to_your_script"

For a specific device, you'd use lsusb to get the idVendor and idProduct values first.

 

For Windows, probably WMI event monitoring with class Win32_USBControllerDevice either with PS or the C++ WMI COM API... not sure. 

[Franck]

For windows with C# it's a few line of code. Probably a couple more for other languages but it's accessible with any language that has access to WMI. What you do is actually bind to the windows events and detect volume change events when a volume is added it is returning a type 2.

 

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Management;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace ConsoleApp3217
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var watcher = new ManagementEventWatcher();
            var eventQuery = new EventQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_VolumeChangeEvent WHERE EventType = 2");

            watcher.EventArrived += (s, e) =>
            {
                // this give you like "E:" or "H:"
                var drive = e.NewEvent.Properties["DriveName"].Value.ToString();

                if (File.Exists(drive + "\\myfile.script"))
                {
                    // execute the script  
                }
            };

            watcher.Query = eventQuery;
            watcher.Start();

            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

 

[Fredrik Svantesson]

As others have stated; Welcome to the world of WMI. You will not like it, and there are multiple ways to do this depending on your criteria. For example, you need to do very different things if you only want USB devices, or if you only want "portable" devices, or if you want any devices. There are tons of different groups and stuff in WMI for a ton of different things, and nothing is the way you expect it to be. 

 

I recommend getting a debug utility to do manual queries to WMI to see whats available. Some already exist for this purpose.

 

GLHF.

[cyrilschreiber]

It's for any language (python, C, C+, etc...)

and i'm on windows