How to detect the physical connected state of a network cable/connector?

Question

In a Linux environment, I need to detect the physical connected or disconnected state of an RJ45 connector to its socket. Preferably using BASH scripting only.

The

Answer 1

On the low level, these events can be caught using rtnetlink sockets, without any polling. Side note: if you use rtnetlink, you have to work together with udev, or your program may get confused when udev renames a new network interface.

The problem with doing network configurations with shell scripts is that shell scripts are terrible for event handling (such as a network cable being plugged in and out). If you need something more powerful, take a look at my NCD programming language, a programming language designed for network configurations.

For example, a simple NCD script that will print "cable in" and "cable out" to stdout (assuming the interface is already up):

process foo {
    # Wait for device to appear and be configured by udev.
    net.backend.waitdevice("eth0");
    # Wait for cable to be plugged in.
    net.backend.waitlink("eth0");
    # Print "cable in" when we reach this point, and "cable out"
    # when we regress.
    println("cable in");   # or pop_bubble("Network cable in.");
    rprintln("cable out"); # or rpop_bubble("Network cable out!");
                           # just joking, there's no pop_bubble() in NCD yet :)
}

(internally, net.backend.waitlink() uses rtnetlink, and net.backend.waitdevice() uses udev)

The idea of NCD is that you use it exclusively to configure the network, so normally, configuration commands would come in between, such as:

process foo {
    # Wait for device to appear and be configured by udev.
    net.backend.waitdevice("eth0");
    # Set device up.
    net.up("eth0");
    # Wait for cable to be plugged in.
    net.backend.waitlink("eth0");
    # Add IP address to device.
    net.ipv4.addr("eth0", "192.168.1.61", "24");
}

The important part to note is that execution is allowed to regress; in the second example, for instance, if the cable is pulled out, the IP address will automatically be removed.