Determine if a network interface is wireless or wired

Question

I have a program that has two separate sections: one of them should be executed when the network interface is wireless LAN and the other one when it's a wired LAN connection. How can I know that inside of my program? What function should I use to get that information?

Answer 1

You can call ioctl(fd, SIOCGIWNAME) that returns the wireless extension protocol version, which is only available on interfaces that are wireless.

int check_wireless(const char* ifname, char* protocol) {
  int sock = -1;
  struct iwreq pwrq;
  memset(&pwrq, 0, sizeof(pwrq));
  strncpy(pwrq.ifr_name, ifname, IFNAMSIZ);

  if ((sock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0)) == -1) {
    perror("socket");
    return 0;
  }

  if (ioctl(sock, SIOCGIWNAME, &pwrq) != -1) {
    if (protocol) strncpy(protocol, pwrq.u.name, IFNAMSIZ);
    close(sock);
    return 1;
  }

  close(sock);
  return 0;
}

For a complete example see: https://gist.github.com/edufelipe/6108057

Answer 2

If your device name is NETDEVICE, a check of the existence of the /sys/class/net/NETDEVICE/wireless directory is a predicate you can use. This is a Linux-only approach, though, and it assumes that /sys is mounted, which is almost always the normal case. It's also easier to employ this method from scripts, rather than dealing with ioctl()s.