Concept

Ifconfig

Summary
ifconfig (short for interface config) is a system administration utility in Unix-like operating systems for network interface configuration. The utility is a command-line interface tool and is also used in the system startup scripts of many operating systems. It has features for configuring, controlling, and querying TCP/IP network interface parameters. Ifconfig originally appeared in 4.2BSD as part of the BSD TCP/IP suite. Common uses for ifconfig include setting the IP address and netmask of a network interface and disabling or enabling an interface. At boot time, many Unix-like operating systems initialize their network interfaces with shell scripts that call ifconfig. As an interactive tool, system administrators routinely use the utility to display and analyze network interface parameters. The following two examples show the output of the tool when querying the state of a single active interface each on a Linux-based host (interface eth0) and the ural0 interface on an OpenBSD installation. eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:20:CF:8B:42 inet addr:192.168.1.128 Bcast: Mask:255.255.255.192 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2472694671 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:44641779 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:1761467179 (1679.7 Mb) TX bytes:2870928587 (2737.9 Mb) Interrupt:28 ural0: flags=8843 mtu 1500 lladdr 00:0d:0b:ed:84:fb media: IEEE802.11 DS2 mode 11b hostap (autoselect mode 11b hostap) status: active ieee80211: nwid ARK chan 11 bssid 00:0d:0b:ed:84:fb 100dBm inet 172.30.50.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.30.50.255 inet6 fe80::20d:bff:feed:84fb%ural0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xa HWaddr: hardware address, MAC address. The parameter txqueuelen is measured in number of Ethernet frames and is the size of the buffer that is being managed by the network scheduler. ifconfig is also commonly used to change the medium access control (MAC) address of an interface.
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