My laptop has a built-in webcam which I don’t normally want enabled. The immediately obvious solution to this would be to blacklist the usb webcam kernel module (uvcvideo). However, I sometimes want to plug in an external USB webcam and use that. So how do you unplug/disable a built-in USB device under Linux?

After a bit of poking about it turns out to be possible to do via sysfs, but it’s a bit fiddly. So I wrote a script that I can run from rc.local to disable (or enable) a device with a specific vendor and product id.

Example usage:

$ lsusb
[...]
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 04ca:7034 Lite-On Technology Corp. 
[...]
usbEnableDisable.sh 04ca 7034 disable