Network Interface MAC Address

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Below is my somewhat brute force method of getting an interface MAC address, but in the interests of learning something, I’m sure there’s a more efficient way. Any clues?

set ipData to do shell script "ifconfig en0" as string
set macLoc to (offset of "ether" in ipData) + 6
set macAdd to ""
repeat with k from macLoc to (macLoc + 16)
	set macAdd to macAdd & character k of ipData
end repeat
macAdd
#2

This would also work:

do shell script "ifconfig en0 | grep ether | cut -c 8-24"
set MACaddress to result
#3

Thanks. I was ok up to grep ether, but forgot cut -c as the way to get the characters.

#4

FWIW, you could also use cut like this:

cut -d " " -f 2

That would split the line at every space and return the second item (similar to AS’s text item delimiters). [If you use that inside AppleScript, you’ll have to escape the quotation marks.]

#5

Works as advertised although I don’t see the advantage. The interesting part is “similar to AS’s text item delimiters” because the ability to combine the power of a simple grep (for those of us with limited RegEx capability - takes me forever to figure out the RegEx for a sed) with ASTID’s could be rather handy.

#6

A caveat to this is that different interfaces have different MAC addresses. “en0” is usually the primary ethernet interface but you could have multiple ethernet interfaces, AirPort, etc.:

set ethernet_MAC_add to do shell script "ifconfig en0 | grep ether | cut -c 8-24"
set airport_MAC_add to do shell script "ifconfig en1 | grep ether | cut -c 8-24"
return {ethernet_MAC_add:ethernet_MAC_add, airport_MAC_add:airport_MAC_add}

Jon

#7

You can also use IP over FireWire, which would probably be device fw0. When I check that on my machine I get this:

Of course, this won’t work with my script in its current state. If you’re looking for MAC addresses, be sure to put in the correct device name.

#8

You should be able to do something like this:

on getMAC(device)
	if device starts with "en" then
		get "ether"
	else if device starts with "fw" then
		get "lladdr"
	end if
	
	try
		do shell script "ifconfig " & device & " | grep " & result & " | cut -d \" \" -f 2"
		return result
	on error
		return missing value
	end try
end getMAC

getMAC("en0")