How to Grab MAC Address of Active Ethernet Connection in Bash Script?

Posted by Huy Tran on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Huy Tran
Published on 2010-04-21T22:47:55Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 22:53 UTC
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Simple Question:

How do I grab the MAC address of the active Ethernet connection in a bash script?

I currently have:

set - `/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | head -1`
MAC=$5

Which outputs the MAC address of the eth0, but if it's eth1 that's active, I want that instead.

Could I beforehand execute ifconfig | grep inet but that wouldn't tell me which interface is active, just that one is active. I need to grab the line above it to tell me which one is the active connection.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

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