MAC stands for Media Access Control, and each identifier is intended to be unique to a particular device. You can install GNU sed with MacPorts, and it should be made available as gsed, but Homebrew might supersede your system's sed depending on how you have your $PATH variable arranged. A MAC address (media access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. GNU sed will interpret character escapes like in the replacement pattern just fine, and you wouldn't even need above workaround. The device’s MAC address, also known as the Hardware Address (HWaddr), is displayed, along with other data bits like ether, lladdr, and so on. The command will be executed by typing ‘ifconfig -a’ into the terminal. Also, because all the 'invisible' characters can be represented literally, your solution can be copy-pasted without loss of information, and will be much more obvious/durable if you're using including this sed invocation in a script that other people might end up reading.Īlso note that macOS's version of sed is the BSD version. For Linux and UNIX users, finding the MAC address of any device that is connected to your Linux-based system is simple.

This does not rely on your terminal understanding the Control+ V (insert next character literally) key binding-some may not.

It expands ANSI C-style escape sequences such as and and returns the result as a single-quoted string. using the 'ANSI-C quoting' feature of the Bash shell is probably preferable.

Mac on linux command line