macOS 27: ifconfig command no longer prints hardware MAC address

Just a quick PSA. A handful of my scripts broke today after installing macOS 27. Turns out they decided to redact the interface hardware ether/MAC addresses, all of them report 02:00:00:00:00:00

(…unless you run with "sudo")

Luckily, you can still get the MAC addresses with

    networksetup -getmacaddress en0

4 points | by luckman212 1 day ago

6 comments

luckman212 2 hours ago
I filed a bashbug: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?68722
luckman212 3 hours ago
27.0.1 did not fix it, and I reproduced it on 2 more Macs, one was literally factory reset, just installed a fresh macOS 27, installed Homebrew, installed Bash5, ran ifconfig .... bug reproduced
luckman212 3 hours ago
Interestingly, running `ifconfig` from a Zsh shell still does show MAC addresses
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago
ifconfig is deprecated in modern Linux. Is it not deprecated in BSD? Does Apple not provide the ip(8) command-line tools?
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/stonking/man8/ip.8.html
No, it seems that iproute2 is Linux-first, or Linux-only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2
Sad!
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- dTal 1 hour ago
  Who says it's deprecated? If it's the same people who think my Ethernet port should be called "enp0s31f6" instead of "eth0", then I'm afraid I do not respect their authority...

lapcat 1 day ago

I can't reproduce this.

[-]

luckman212 18 hours ago

It seems to only affect Bash 5.3.20 (Homebrew) - very odd:

    % /bin/bash --version
    GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (arm64-apple-darwin26)
    
    % /opt/homebrew/bin/bash --version
    GNU bash, version 5.3.20(1)-release (aarch64-apple-darwin27.0.0)
    
    % zsh -c '/sbin/ifconfig en0 | grep ether'
    ether d0:11:e5:1a:27:7a
    
    % /bin/bash -c '/sbin/ifconfig en0 | grep ether'
    ether d0:11:e5:1a:27:7a
    
    % /opt/homebrew/bin/bash -c '/sbin/ifconfig en0 | grep ether'
    ether 02:00:00:00:00:00

[-]

hrbrmstr 17 hours ago
it works fine in system bash for me
[-]
- luckman212 10 hours ago
  Yes it works in my system bash too (see above) - seems to be some sort of obscure Bash bug...