Enumerating interfaces on your machine

If you need to list the network interfaces present on your machine, it is not very complicated in Python. There are a couple of third-party libraries out there that can do this job in a few lines. However, let's see how this is done using a pure socket call.

Getting ready

You need to run this recipe on a Linux box. To get the list of available interfaces, you can execute the following command:

$ /sbin/ifconfig

How to do it...

Listing 3.4 shows how to list the networking interfaces, as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition -- Chapter - 3 
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
 
import sys 
import socket 
import fcntl 
import struct 
import array 
 
SIOCGIFCONF = 0x8912 #from C library sockios.h 
STUCT_SIZE_32 = 32 
STUCT_SIZE_64 = 40 
PLATFORM_32_MAX_NUMBER =  2**32 
DEFAULT_INTERFACES = 8 
 
 
def list_interfaces(): 
 ...