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I use a lot of scripts that involve the Mac addresses of my network cards. Is there a file I can read or a command that I can use to JUST get the Mac address? I don't want any headers or anything, just 1 line of output that has the Mac address. I would like to set this as an environment variable on login. I use Arch Linux x64

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  • Whatever command you normally use to see the MAC address, pipe its output through awk (or perl, or ...) and pull out just the bit you want.
    – alexis
    Jan 31, 2013 at 19:29
  • Be aware that the MAC address is not a static unchangable value it used to be. Pretty much everywhere it is user configurable/changable.
    – mdpc
    Feb 1, 2013 at 3:32

2 Answers 2

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 VARIABLE="$(cat /sys/class/net/$IFACE/address)"

It's hard to do it simpler.

Well, actually:

 read -r MACADDRESS < /sys/class/net/$iFACE/address

is even simpler, and starts no additional process.

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  • VARIABLE=`cat /sys/class/net/$IFACE/address` also work.
    – haccks
    Aug 18, 2016 at 7:40
  • I knew there had to be a more graceful way than using sed on ip link show dev $iface. Well done.
    – Bruno Bronosky
    Nov 6, 2018 at 4:55
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This works for me. Can probably be optimized a bit:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep -o 'HWaddr  *[0-9A-F:]*' | sed -s 's/HWaddr *//'

I don't think you can simplify it much from this. I did an strace on the ifconfig, and it seems you pull the MAC addr with an ioctl() on a socket, not from a /proc file.

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  • 4
    ifconfig is deprecated on Linux, in favor of ip, which is as easily parsable: ip link show dev eth0 | sed -nre 's@.*link\/ether (\S+).*@\1@p'
    – BatchyX
    Jan 31, 2013 at 19:47
  • Have you figured out a way to do this without regular expressions?
    – Ben
    Aug 11, 2014 at 18:40

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