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

Comments

lapcatSep 27, 2026, 6:10 PM
I can't reproduce this.
luckman212Sep 28, 2026, 3:15 AM
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
hrbrmstrSep 28, 2026, 4:52 AM
it works fine in system bash for me