How can I find out my WiFi adapter's MAC address on Ubuntu Linux?

Question

What command can I enter in a terminal to find out the MAC address of my WiFi adapter?

Solution 1

Combining the answer from @user562374 with a little scripting:

ip addr show $(awk 'NR==3{print $1}' /proc/net/wireless | tr -d :) | awk '/ether/{print $2}'

The wireless interface is shown in /proc/net/wireless and that is used to extract the MAC address from the ip addr output.

Solution 2

You will want to look at iwconfig and ifconfig for information about your ethernet controllers. iwconfig is geared towards wireless.

Solution 3

For details about your wifi interface, use

iw dev

Or, if you just want the MAC address

iw dev | grep addr | awk '{print $2}'

Solution 4

From the arch wiki docs:

To find the MAC address that corresponds with a particular interface (ie wlan0), you can enter this command:

ip link show <interface-name>

The MAC address is the one that has "link/ether" followed by a 6-byte number. It will probably look something like this:

link/ether e8:b1:fc:9c:a6:8a brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Where the MAC address is e8:b1:fc:9c:a6:8a

*If you don't know your interface name, just enter ip link to list the MAC addresses and interface names of all your interfaces. *

Solution 5

/sbin/ifconfig | grep HWaddr

You can add the interface name of your WiFi card (e.g. wlan0) after ifconfig, but it's not necessary.

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Comments

[Arcege]

On my Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 systems, the wifi interface is eth1.

[bitsmack]

This answer is current and correct as of 2021. The original question and most of the other answers are over a decade old!