Programatically Getting IP Address on the MacBook Air

(It’s tougher than you think.)

Obtaining the IP address on a desktop Mac with built-in ethernet ports is relatively straightforward. You can rely on en0 existing and the connection being stable. On desktops, TCP connections are maintained, even in a “CLOSE_WAIT” state:

# netstat -p tcp
 Active Internet connections
 Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.62146 a192-17-157-46.zz.https SYN_SENT
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.62145 192.69.245.140.https ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.62106 my.server..micro ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.60876 192.70.186.139.sip-tls ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.net-as 192.29.231.207.61415 ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.net-as 192.29.231.207.61414 ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.49273 proxy.net.pcsyn CLOSE_WAIT
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.49272 proxy.net.pcsyn CLOSE_WAIT

However, the MacBook Air has no built-in ethernet. To hardwire one to a network, a USB<->Ethernet transceiver must be added on. And in an effort to save power, the Air drops any unused connections after 5 seconds. Witness:

# netstat -p tcp
 Active Internet connections
 Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.62145 192.69.245.140.https ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.net-as 192.29.231.207.61415 ESTABLISHED
 tcp4 0 0 192.118.156.212.net-as 192.29.231.207.61414 ESTABLISHED

After a few seconds the very same command yields zilch:

# netstat -p tcp
#

So any scripts you write to grab the IP address that use netstat (the preferred method you’ll find recommended by almost all sites if you Google the topic) will yield a blank result.

You could activate the TCP connection by launching Safari or issuing a curl command and quickly reading netstat’s output within 5 seconds, but that’s a kludge.

The better answer? Good old ifconfig, which will yield the persistent IP state of the Mac no matter how long the network connections have been idle. On the same Air as above where netstat was reporting no info, you get this:

# ifconfig | grep "broadcast"
 inet 192.118.156.212 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.118.156.255

Ding! (note that we limited the search to lines containing “broadcast” to prevent finding the loopback and other ports irrelevant to our current need.)

To complete the search for a usable IP, we just:

#ip=`ifconfig | grep "broadcast" | cut -d " " -f2`
#echo $ip
192.118.156.212

Now you have $ip waiting for you to act on. Examples:

if [ "$ip" = "" ]; then
   echo "No ethernet cable appears to be plugged in."
fi

Or

if [ "${ip:0:7}" = "169.254" ]; then
   echo "No DHCP server was found."
fi

Have fun!