Can I get just the list of network interfaces from ip?

Question

I am looking to retrieve a list of network interfaces.

Currently I am returning the results of ip addr and then doing some regex/string searching from output like this:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 
84: eth0@if85: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default 
    link/ether 02:42:ac:11:00:02 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 172.17.0.2/16 scope global eth0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::42:acff:fe11:2/64 scope link tentative 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

I don't really care about all the meta data, I am just looking for the interface names. So I would like to instead get:

1: lo
84: eth0@if85

Is there a way to filter the results of the ip addr command? I can definitely do some other cli magic or just regex magic in my app, but it'd be nice to have ip itself filter.

Answer 1

Yes, you can.

Using grep with PCRE(-P):

ip addr | grep -Po '^\d+:\s+\K[^:]+'

• ^\d+:\s+ matched the portion before interface name at the start, \K discards the match

• [^:]+ gets the portion upto the next : i.e. the interface name

Similar logic using sed:

ip addr | sed -nE 's/^[[:digit:]]+:[[:blank:]]+([^:]+).*/\1/p'

On my system:

% ip addr | grep -Po '^\d+:\s+\K[^:]+'
lo
eth0
wlan0

% ip addr | sed -nE 's/^[[:digit:]]+:[[:blank:]]+([^:]+).*/\1/p'
lo
eth0
wlan0

---

What you should really do:

Linux kernel provides an interface for peeking into the hardware, it is sysfs, mounted on /sys.

You can get the interface name by just getting to the appropriate location of /sys, /sys/class/net/ directory precisely.

On my system:

% ls -1 /sys/class/net/
eth0
lo
wlan0

Each of these are directories, with the subdirectories containing files and directories having all the info regarding the interface.

Here's the listing of the contents of /sys/class/net/eth0 directory:

% ls -1 /sys/class/net/eth0                                    
addr_assign_type
address
addr_len
broadcast
carrier
carrier_changes
device
dev_id
dev_port
dormant
duplex
flags
gro_flush_timeout
ifalias
ifindex
iflink
link_mode
mtu
name_assign_type
netdev_group
operstate
phys_port_id
phys_port_name
phys_switch_id
power
queues
speed
statistics
subsystem
tx_queue_len
type
uevent

---

Answer to the edited question:

To get the interface name along with index:

grep:

ip addr | grep -o '^[0-9]\+:[^:]\+'

sed:

ip addr | sed -nE 's/^([[:digit:]]+:[^:]+).*/\1/p'

For each interface directory in /sys/class/net/, you can read the file ifindex. For example for interface eth0, the index file is:

/sys/class/net/eth0/ifindex