Find MAC Address in Ubuntu Fast

Find MAC Address in Ubuntu Fast | Generated by AI

Home 2026.02

Question: How to find the MAC address on an Ubuntu computer?

Answer:

The easiest and most modern way to find the MAC address (also called hardware address or physical address) on Ubuntu is using the ip command in the terminal. This works on current Ubuntu versions (including 22.04, 24.04, and later in 2026).

Recommended Method (Command Line – works everywhere)

Open a Terminal (press Ctrl + Alt + T or search for “Terminal”).

Run one of these commands:

Full detailed view (recommended):
```
ip link show
```
or
```
ip addr show
```

Look for the line starting with link/ether under each network interface.

Example output (yours will be different):

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether **b8:27:eb:12:34:56** brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlp2s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether **a0:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff** brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

The MAC address is the six groups of two hexadecimal digits after link/ether (e.g., b8:27:eb:12:34:56).
Common interface names:
- Ethernet (wired): enpXsY, eth0, eno1, etc.
- Wi-Fi (wireless): wlpXsY, wlan0, etc.
- Ignore lo (loopback — it always shows 00:00:00:00:00:00).

To see only the MAC addresses (clean output):

ip link show | grep -i ether

or (even cleaner, one per line):

LANG=C ip link show | awk '/link\/ether/ {print $2}'

Alternative Methods

Using /sys/class/net (very reliable, no extra parsing needed):
```
cat /sys/class/net/*/address
```
→ Shows MAC for every interface (one per line). Ignore lo if present.
For a specific interface (e.g., Ethernet named enp3s0):
```
cat /sys/class/net/enp3s0/address
```
Older method (still works on many systems, but ifconfig is deprecated):
```
ifconfig -a | grep -i "ether\|HWaddr"
```
(You may need to install net-tools first with sudo apt install net-tools if ifconfig is missing.)

Quick Tip for Wake-on-LAN

If you’re finding the MAC for WOL (like in your original test steps), use the wired Ethernet interface MAC (not Wi-Fi), as Wake-on-LAN typically only works over Ethernet.

References:

Back Donate