Technical: To get the Mac address of a host

In JDK 1.6 a new method is added in the java.net.NetworkInterface class, this method is getHardwareAddress().

This simple example below will illustrate:

import java.net.InetAddress;
import java.net.NetworkInterface;
import java.net.SocketException;
import java.net.UnknownHostException;

public class MacAddress {

public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
InetAddress address = InetAddress.getLocalHost();

/*
* Get NetworkInterface for the current host and then read the
* hardware address.
*/
NetworkInterface ni = NetworkInterface.getByInetAddress(address);
byte[] mac = ni.getHardwareAddress();

/*
* Extract each array of mac address and convert it to hexa with the
* following format 08-00-27-DC-4A-9E.
*/
for (int i = 0; i < mac.length; i++) {
System.out.format("%02X%s", mac[i], (i < mac.length - 1) ? "-" : "");
}
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (SocketException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}