Getting MAC Address

Question

I need a cross platform method of determining the MAC address of a computer at run time   For windows the  wmi  module can be used and the only method under Linux I could find was to run ifconfig and run a regex across its output   I don t like using a package that only works on one OS  and parsing the output of another program doesn t seem very elegant not to mention error prone    Does anyone know a cross platform method  windows and linux  method to get the MAC address     If not  does anyone know any more elegant methods then those I listed above

User · Answer

Sometimes we have more than one net interface.

A simple method to find out the mac address of a specific interface, is:

def getmac(interface):

  try:
    mac = open('/sys/class/net/'+interface+'/address').readline()
  except:
    mac = "00:00:00:00:00:00"

  return mac[0:17]

to call the method is simple

myMAC = getmac("wlan0")

User · Answer

netifaces is a good module to use for getting the mac address  and other addresses   It s crossplatform and makes a bit more sense than using socket or uuid    gt  gt  gt  import netifaces  gt  gt  gt  netifaces interfaces     lo    eth0    tun2     gt  gt  gt  netifaces ifaddresses  eth0   netifaces AF LINK     addr    08 00 27 50 f2 51    broadcast    ff ff ff ff ff ff         pypi location Good Intro to netifaces

User · Answer

For Linux let me introduce a shell script that will show the mac address and allows to change it  MAC sniffing     ifconfig eth0   grep HWaddr  cut -dH -f2 cut -d   -f2  00 26 6c df c3 95   Cut arguements may dffer  I am not an expert  try   ifconfig etho   grep HWaddr eth0      Link encap Ethernet  HWaddr 00 26 6c df c3 95     To change MAC we may do   ifconfig eth0 down ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00 80 48 BA d1 30 ifconfig eth0 up   will change mac address to 00 80 48 BA d1 30  temporarily  will restore to actual one upon reboot

User · Answer

To get the eth0 interface MAC address   import psutil  nics   psutil net if addrs    eth0    for interface in nics     if interface family    17        print interface address

User · Answer

For Linux you can retrieve the MAC address using a SIOCGIFHWADDR ioctl   struct ifreq    ifr  uint8 t         macaddr 6    if   s   socket AF INET  SOCK DGRAM  IPPROTO IP    lt  0      return -1   strcpy ifr ifr name   eth0     if  ioctl s  SIOCGIFHWADDR   void    amp ifr     0        if  ifr ifr hwaddr sa family    ARPHRD ETHER            memcpy macaddr  ifr ifr hwaddr sa data  6           return 0      etc       You ve tagged the question  python   I don t know of an existing Python module to get this information  You could use ctypes to call the ioctl directly

User · Answer

You can do this with psutil which is cross-platform   import psutil nics   psutil net if addrs   print  j address for j in nics i  for i in nics if i   lo  and j family  17

User · Answer

Alternatively   import uuid mac id      join     02x   format  uuid getnode    gt  gt  ele   amp  0xff

User · Answer

The pure python solution for this problem under Linux to get the MAC for a specific local interface  originally posted as a comment by vishnubob and improved by  on Ben Mackey in this activestate recipe     usr bin python  import fcntl  socket  struct  def getHwAddr ifname       s   socket socket socket AF INET  socket SOCK DGRAM      info   fcntl ioctl s fileno    0x8927   struct pack  256s   ifname  15        return     join    02x    ord char  for char in info 18 24     print getHwAddr  eth0     This is the Python 3 compatible code      usr bin env python3   - - coding  utf-8 - -  import fcntl import socket import struct   def getHwAddr ifname       s   socket socket socket AF INET  socket SOCK DGRAM      info   fcntl ioctl s fileno    0x8927   struct pack  256s   bytes ifname   utf-8    15        return     join   02x    b for b in info 18 24     def main        print getHwAddr  enp0s8      if   name         main         main

User · Answer

The cross-platform getmac package will work for this  if you don t mind taking on a dependency  It works with Python 2 7  and 3 4   It will try many different methods until either getting a address or returning None  from getmac import get mac address eth mac   get mac address interface  quot eth0 quot   win mac   get mac address interface  quot Ethernet 3 quot   ip mac   get mac address ip  quot 192 168 0 1 quot   ip6 mac   get mac address ip6  quot   1 quot   host mac   get mac address hostname  quot localhost quot   updated mac   get mac address ip  quot 10 0 0 1 quot   network request True   Disclaimer  I am the author of the package  Update  Jan 14 2019   the package now only supports Python 2 7  and 3 4   You can still use an older version of the package if you need to work with an older Python  2 5  2 6  3 2  3 3

User · Answer

I dont know of a unified way  but heres something that you might find useful   http   www codeguru com Cpp I-N network networkinformation article php c5451  What I would do in this case would be to wrap these up into a function  and based on the OS it would run the proper command  parse as required and return only the MAC address formatted as you want  Its ofcourse all the same  except that you only have to do it once  and it looks cleaner from the main code

User · Answer

Python 2 5 includes an uuid implementation which  in at least one version  needs the mac address   You can import the mac finding function into your own code easily   from uuid import getnode as get mac mac   get mac     The return value is the mac address as 48 bit integer

User · Answer

Using my answer from here  https   stackoverflow com a 18031868 2362361  It would be important to know to which iface you want the MAC for since many can exist  bluetooth  several nics  etc     This does the job when you know the IP of the iface you need the MAC for  using netifaces  available in PyPI    import netifaces as nif def mac for ip ip        Returns a list of MACs for interfaces that have given IP  returns None if not found      for i in nif interfaces            addrs   nif ifaddresses i          try              if mac   addrs nif AF LINK  0   addr               if ip   addrs nif AF INET  0   addr           except IndexError  KeyError   ignore ifaces that dont have MAC or IP             if mac   if ip   None         if if ip    ip              return if mac     return None   Testing    gt  gt  gt  mac for ip  169 254 90 191    2c 41 38 0a 94 8b

User · Answer

Note that you can build your own cross-platform library in python using conditional imports   e g   import platform if platform system       Linux     import LinuxMac   mac address   LinuxMac get mac address   elif platform system       Windows       etc   This will allow you to use os system calls or platform-specific libraries

User · Answer

One other thing that you should note is that uuid getnode   can fake the MAC addr by returning a random 48-bit number which may not be what you are expecting  Also  there s no explicit indication that the MAC address has been faked  but you could detect it by calling getnode   twice and seeing if the result varies  If the same value is returned by both calls  you have the MAC address  otherwise you are getting a faked address    gt  gt  gt  print uuid getnode   doc   Get the hardware address as a 48-bit positive integer       The first time this runs  it may launch a separate program  which could     be quite slow   If all attempts to obtain the hardware address fail  we     choose a random 48-bit number with its eighth bit set to 1 as recommended     in RFC 4122

[python] Getting MAC Address

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