I'm trying to find a way to check, from a shell script, what type of device each of the system's network devices is. I'm using Xubuntu 16.04.1.

Looking through '/sys/class/net/', I've noticed that wireless devices have a 'wireless' subdirectory, eg. '/sys/class/net/wlp3s0/wireless', and a 'uevent' file containing the line 'DEVTYPE=wlan'. Are these reliable properties for determining that a device is a wireless network device?

Is there anything that indicates an ethernet device, or is it only inferred by the lack of other indicators such as the 'wireless' indicators? There is no ethernet equivalent to the 'wireless' subdirectory and 'wlan' value. Are there any other flags that definitively indicate an ethernet device?

With predictable naming the first two characters indicate the type of device. wl is wireless and en is a PCI ethernet adapter.

https://blog.laimbock.com/2014/11/22...omment-page-1/
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof...nterfaceNames/

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately it seems it doesn't always work that way, so I was hoping to find a hardware-dependent flag of some kind to indicate an ethernet interface.

On my desktop pc the ethernet nic (on the motherboard, not in a pci slot, btw) is named 'p3p1'; the command 'journalctl -b | grep eth0' shows this:
On my laptop the the ethernet nic is 'enp2s0', and the same command shows:

The laptop adapter is on the motherboard whereas the desktop is a PCI device I would guess. I don't know if there is an independent flag.