UPD: Changed question title from manage devices to discover information about devicesOne of the frequent thing I do is look up info about devices on my systems. And I am constantly find myself confused about various different commands on Linux to query available disks, network adapters, graphics cards etc.For example, if I need to query all disk drives available, I do:ls -la /dev/disk/by-idIf I need to query all network cards available, I do:ls -la /sys/class/netIs there any single point to query all device ids by type?Maybe there was initiative to unify handling of devices info and make it discoverable/accessible, but it failed? History of the question in order of appearance:/dev/disk/ lists disks, why /dev/net/ doesn't list network interfaces?Why are network interfaces not in /dev like other devices?
Is there a uniform way to discover information about devices?
devices;udev
There is no single standard or tool to query hardware devices on Linux systems in general. Depending on your host's architecture, and which of its components you must query, and how much detail you need about it, you may need one or more tools specific to that component. However some commands/tools are in wider use and have greater mindshare than others. Following are some--that may or may not be available for your particular host--but are nonetheless Generally Regarded As Useful and widely available from major package managers (though I only link to Debian below):all-purpose query tools:hwinfo. hwinfo --short - gives a useful overview of The Whole Enchilada, and info hwinfo shows many other options for querying specific subsystems in detail.inxi is part of a larger collection of system administration tools with similarly general capabilities.tools for specific subsystems:dmidecode - processor, memory and motherboard details from BIOSlscpu - processor details from /proc/cpuinfolspci - PCI devices, typically graphics cards, audio cards, network cardslsusb - USB devices in generalls -l /dev/disk/by-{id,label}/ - block devices and their block device filesls -l /sys/class/net/ - network devices and their network interfacesudevinfo - block devices, if using udevI encourage people to expand this list if some essential tool is missing.