Best way to get the MAC of eth0?

Question

Is there a more efficient way to retrieve the MAC address of a NIC in Linux?

This works:

ip link show dev eth0 | awk ' /link\/ether/ { print $2 }'

but can it be found via something like:

cat /sys/net/something

Zanchey · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-05T10:19:48.727

27

It's at /sys/class/net/eth0/address (or more precisely /sys/devices/pciXXXX:XX/XXXX/net/eth0/address where the XXX is your PCI bus ID, but this varies between systems).

(Incidentally, I found this with find /sys -name eth0 and looking at the files in the directories identified.)

edited Sep 05 '11 at 10:19

answered Sep 05 '11 at 10:00

Zanchey

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score 4 · Answer 2 · 2011-09-05T19:32:03.750

4

It's also available via ifconfig:

kce@thinkpad:~$ /sbin/ifconfig eth0 |grep HWaddr
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1e:37:cc:ce:cc

Or if you want just the MAC address:

kce@thinkpad:~$ /sbin/ifconfig eth0 |awk '/HWaddr/{print $5}'
00:1e:37:cc:ce:cc

edited Sep 05 '11 at 19:32

answered Sep 05 '11 at 18:32

2

Well, you still have to awk or cut it. Because the mac is at the end of line. – brodul Sep 05 '11 at 18:58

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 03 '11 at 13:57

3

if you can install moreutils package, there is a ifdata tool. Description says:

ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output

Here's an example:

me@box:~$ ifdata -ph eth0
00:21:86:61:35:44

answered Oct 03 '11 at 13:57

Michał Šrajer

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Best way to get the MAC of eth0?

3 Answers3