Hacker News — vinext + Cloudflare Workers

NHacker Next

new
past
show
ask
show
jobs
submit

▲macOS 27: ifconfig command no longer prints hardware MAC address

6 points by luckman212 2 days ago | 12 comments

asiliev20 6 hours ago [-]

Who needs a physical MAC address when you can just have a spiritual connection to the iCloud?

luckman212 14 hours ago [-]

I filed a bashbug: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?68722

luckman212 16 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

19 hours ago [-]

luckman212 15 hours ago [-]

Interestingly, running `ifconfig` from a Zsh shell still does show MAC addresses

lapcat 2 days ago [-]

I can't reproduce this.

luckman212 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]

it works fine in system bash for me

luckman212 22 hours ago [-]

Yes it works in my system bash too (see above) - seems to be some sort of obscure Bash bug...

ButlerianJihad 14 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!

dTal 14 hours 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...

ButlerianJihad 11 hours ago [-]

The people who maintained it, the kernel developers, the Debian distribution team? You don't accept their authority? I mean, I know this is a MacOS thread, but that's wild.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00780.html

16+ years ago

The maintainers barely touched it since 2001.

fragmede 10 hours ago [-]

Fascinatingly enough, this is Conway's law in action. The Linux kernel doesn't break user space, and ifconfig is on the user space side of that boundary. On BSD, they're organized differently, and went a different way.

Rendered at 09:41:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.