How to change mac address on Linux temporarily

Whats a MAC address?

A MAC address is a physical way of addressing your network card at a hardware level.

Open up a terminal and run:

$ ifconfig wlan0 | grep HWaddr

Where I have wlan0 you would put your networking device.

My output:

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 8c:a9:82:6c:9b:da

As you can see my MAC address is 8c:a9:82:6c:9b:da.

Open up a terminal as root and run:

$ ifconfig wlan0 down
$ ifconfig wlan0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:01
$ ifconfig wlan0 up

This will have changed your MAC address to 00:00:00:00:00:01.

To show this run:

ifconfig wlan0 | grep HWaddr

This change will not survive a reboot.