Network/Lan card commands

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

You want to look at the nodes in

/sys/class/net/

I experimented with mine:

Wire Plugged in:

eth0/carrier:1
eth0/operstate:unknown

Wire Removed:

eth0/carrier:0
eth0/operstate:down

Wire Plugged in Again:

eth0/operstate:up
eth0/carrier:1

Side Trick: harvesting all properties at once the easy way:

grep "" eth0/*

This forms a nice list of key:value pairs.