How can I listen for 'usb device inserted' events in Linux, in Python?

Question

I\'d like to write a Python script for Amarok in Linux to automatically copy the stackoverflow podcast to my player. When I plug in the player, it would mount the drive, cop

Answer 1

Here is a solution in 5 lines.

import pyudev

context = pyudev.Context()
monitor = pyudev.Monitor.from_netlink(context)
monitor.filter_by(subsystem='usb')

for device in iter(monitor.poll, None):
    if device.action == 'add':
        print('{} connected'.format(device))
        # do something very interesting here.

Save this to a file say usb_monitor.py, run python monitor.py. Plug any usb and it will print device details

→ python usb_monitor.py 
Device('/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-6/1-6:1.0') connected
Device('/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0') connected

Tested on Python 3.5 with pyudev==0.21.0.