You want to take a look at the getifaddrs(3) manual page. There is an example in C in the manpage itself that you can use. You want to get the address with the type AF_LINK.
You need to iterate over all the available interfaces on your machine, and use ioctl with SIOCGIFHWADDR flag to get the mac address. The mac address will be obtained as a 6-octet binary array. You also want to skip the loopback interface.
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <net/if.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <string.h>
int main()
{
struct ifreq ifr;
struct ifconf ifc;
char buf[1024];
int success = 0;
int sock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP);
if (sock == -1) { /* handle error*/ };
ifc.ifc_len = sizeof(buf);
ifc.ifc_buf = buf;
if (ioctl(sock, SIOCGIFCONF, &ifc) == -1) { /* handle error */ }
struct ifreq* it = ifc.ifc_req;
const struct ifreq* const end = it + (ifc.ifc_len / sizeof(struct ifreq));
for (; it != end; ++it) {
strcpy(ifr.ifr_name, it->ifr_name);
if (ioctl(sock, SIOCGIFFLAGS, &ifr) == 0) {
if (! (ifr.ifr_flags & IFF_LOOPBACK)) { // don't count loopback
if (ioctl(sock, SIOCGIFHWADDR, &ifr) == 0) {
success = 1;
break;
}
}
}
else { /* handle error */ }
}
unsigned char mac_address[6];
if (success) memcpy(mac_address, ifr.ifr_hwaddr.sa_data, 6);
}
Much nicer than all this socket or shell madness is simply using sysfs for this:
the file /sys/class/net/eth0/address carries your mac adress as simple string you can read with fopen()/fscanf()/fclose(). Nothing easier than that.
And if you want to support other network interfaces than eth0 (and you probably want), then simply use opendir()/readdir()/closedir() on /sys/class/net/.
std::vector<std::string> GetAllFiles(const std::string& folder, bool recursive = false)
{
// uses opendir, readdir, and struct dirent.
// left as an exercise to the reader, as it isn't the point of this OP and answer.
}
bool ReadFileContents(const std::string& folder, const std::string& fname, std::string& contents)
{
// uses ifstream to read entire contents
// left as an exercise to the reader, as it isn't the point of this OP and answer.
}
std::vector<std::string> GetAllMacAddresses()
{
std::vector<std::string> macs;
std::string address;
// from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9034575/c-c-linux-mac-address-of-all-interfaces
// ... just read /sys/class/net/eth0/address
// NOTE: there may be more than one: /sys/class/net/*/address
// (1) so walk /sys/class/net/* to find the names to read the address of.
std::vector<std::string> nets = GetAllFiles("/sys/class/net/", false);
for (auto it = nets.begin(); it != nets.end(); ++it)
{
// we don't care about the local loopback interface
if (0 == strcmp((*it).substr(-3).c_str(), "/lo"))
continue;
address.clear();
if (ReadFileContents(*it, "address", address))
{
if (!address.empty())
{
macs.push_back(address);
}
}
}
return macs;
}