Get MAC Address

This post is gonna be a short one. I am currently trying to implement a basic DHCP client and I am trying to figure out how everything works. At some point I needed to find out the MAC address of a given network interface. Yeah, how do I do this in C?

I used the looser trail. I parsed the relevant entry in sysfs. For example, the MAC address if the interface eth0 is exposed by the kernel in the file /sys/class/net/eth0/address. Yeah and that’s it. Pretty simple and not portable to other operating systems, but it works.

This is my C code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <string.h>

uint8_t *getmac(const char *intf) {
    const char template[] = "/sys/class/net/%s/address";
    size_t pathlen = strlen(template) + 15;

    char *path = malloc(pathlen);
    if (path == NULL) {
        return NULL;
    }

    // http://stackoverflow.com/a/29398765
    int ret = snprintf(path, pathlen, template, intf);
    if (ret < 0) {
        return NULL;
    }

    FILE *fd = fopen(path, "r");
    if (fd == NULL) {
        return NULL;
    }
    free(path);

    uint8_t *mac = malloc(6);
    if (mac == NULL) {
        return NULL;
    }

    // http://stackoverflow.com/a/12772708
    fscanf(fd, "%hhx:%hhx:%hhx:%hhx:%hhx:%hhx",
           &mac[0], &mac[1], &mac[2], &mac[3], &mac[4], &mac[5]);

    return mac;
}