Get link speed programmatically?

Question

I am writing an application that reports attributes of network devices on the local machine. I need the mac address, mtu, link speed and a few others. I'm using udev for this. I've already figured out how to get the mac address and mtu, but not how to get the link speed. I can get it with ethtool from the terminal, but I need a way to get it programmatically.

Does anyone know how I can get the link speed attribute with udev or another library?

Answer 1

You can get the link speed in bit per second using the sysfs interface:

cat /sys/class/net/eth0/speed
1000