ok, i know this is an old thread, but this same problem put me through a lot of grief.
this is the best I can do cleanly... it only relies on my ISP to respond to a ping (a very small one too!).
#!/bin/bash
ISP=`traceroute -M 2 -m 2 -n -q 1 8.8.8.8 | grep -m 1 -Eo '[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}'`
extIP=`ping -R -c 1 -t 1 -s 1 -n $ISP | grep RR | grep -m 1 -Eo '[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}'`
echo $extIP
The only other way to do this without relying on any external servers is to get it from curl'ing your modem's status page... I've done this successfully with our frontier DSL modem, but it's dirty, slow, unreliable, and requires hard-coding your modem's password. Here's the "process" for that:
curl http://[user]:[password]@[modem's LAN address]/[status.html] | grep 'WanIPAddress=' | grep -m 1 -Eo '[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}'
That fetches the raw html, searches for any lines containing "WanIpAddress =" (change that so it's appropriate for your modem's results), and then narrows down those results to an IPv4 style address.
Have fun!
