Detect if current connection is metered with NetworkManager
With the nmcli utility, the necessary steps are:
verify NetworkManager is version 1.0.6+:
$ nmcli -v nmcli tool, version 1.9.0
check GENERAL.METERED on an interface:
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.METERED dev show eth1 GENERAL.METERED:unknown
values are:
unknown, yes, no, yes (guessed), no (guessed)
Forcing the value is done like this:
$ nmcli dev modify wlan1 connection.METERED yes Connection successfully reapplied to device 'wlan1' $ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.METERED dev show wlan1 GENERAL.METERED:yes
And, to get a list grouped by device:
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.DEVICE,GENERAL.METERED dev show
GENERAL.DEVICE:wlan1
GENERAL.METERED:yes
GENERAL.DEVICE:eth1
GENERAL.METERED:unknown
GENERAL.DEVICE:lo
GENERAL.METERED:unknown
Trying to cut this down to info on just the default route would still require a call to another command as NetworkManager doesn't try to distinguish between multiple devices in a connected state:
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.DEVICE,GENERAL.METERED dev show `ip route list 0/0 | sed -r 's/.*dev (\S*).*/\1/g'`
You can also get the metered status of the current connection via D-Bus. From a shell, you can use busctl
:
busctl get-property org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.NetworkManager Metered
which is only one command, in contrast to the nmcli
solution, and in other programming languages it can be more efficient to use D-Bus directly instead of having to call nmcli
.