Getting MAC address only from ifconfig

Question

I'm trying to use grep to get me en0's mac address. What I'm trying to do is store that in a variable called original_mac.

This does not seem to be working though. When I type ifconfig en0 | grep ether ifconfig en0 | grep ether i get ether: <mac_address> . I just want to get the mac address part of it.

#get original mac address
    global original_mac
    original_mac = subprocess.check_output("ifconfig en0 | grep ether | awk {print $2}")
    print "mac: "+original_mac

Answer 1

You have to either pass a list to check_output or use 'shell=True'. So this should work:

original_mac = subprocess.check_output("ifconfig en0 | grep ether | awk {print $2}", shell=True)