It has been more than a decade since the ifconfig command has been deprecated on Linux in favor of the iproute2 project, which contains the magical tool ip. Many online tutorial resources still refer to old command-line tools like ifconfig, route, and netstat. The goal of this tutorial is to share some of the simple networking-related things you can do easily using the ip tool instead.

Find your IP address

[dneary@host]$ ip addr show
[snip]
44: wlp4s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
        link/ether 5c:e0:c5:c7:f0:f1 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
        inet 10.16.196.113/23 brd 10.16.197.255 scope global dynamic wlp4s0
        valid_lft 74830sec preferred_lft 74830sec
        inet6 fe80::5ee0:c5ff:fec7:f0f1/64 scope link
        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

ip addr show will show you a lot of information about all of your network link devices. In this case, my wireless Ethernet card (wlp4s0) is the IPv4 address (the inet field) 10.16.196.113/23. The /23 means that there are 23 bits of the 32 bits in the IP address, which will be shared by all of the IP addresses in this subnet. IP addresses in the subnet will range from 10.16.196.0 to 10.16.197.254. The broadcast address for the subnet (the brd field after the IP address) 10.16.197.255 is reserved for broadcast traffic to all hosts on the subnet.

We can show only the information about a single device using ip addr show dev wlp4s0, for example.

Display your routing table


[dneary@host]$ ip route list
default via 10.16.197.254 dev wlp4s0 proto static metric 600
10.16.196.0/23 dev

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