ifconfig(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | Address Families | OPTIONS | NOTES | FILES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | AUTHORS | COLOPHON

IFCONFIG(8)        Linux System Administrator's Manual       IFCONFIG(8)

NAME         top

       ifconfig - configure a network interface

SYNOPSIS         top

       ifconfig [-v] [-a] [-s] [interface]
       ifconfig [-v] interface [aftype] options | address ...

DESCRIPTION         top

       Ifconfig is used to configure the kernel-resident network
       interfaces.  It is used at boot time to set up interfaces as
       necessary.  After that, it is usually only needed when debugging
       or when system tuning is needed.

       If no arguments are given, ifconfig displays the status of the
       currently active interfaces.  If a single interface argument is
       given, it displays the status of the given interface only; if a
       single -a argument is given, it displays the status of all
       interfaces, even those that are down.  Otherwise, it configures
       an interface.

Address Families         top

       If the first argument after the interface name is recognized as
       the name of a supported address family, that address family is
       used for decoding and displaying all protocol addresses.
       Currently supported address families include inet (TCP/IP,
       default), inet6 (IPv6), ax25 (AMPR Packet Radio), ddp (Appletalk
       Phase 2), ipx (Novell IPX) and netrom (AMPR Packet radio).  All
       numbers supplied as parts in IPv4 dotted decimal notation may be
       decimal, octal, or hexadecimal, as specified in the ISO C
       standard (that is, a leading 0x or 0X implies hexadecimal;
       otherwise, a leading '0' implies octal; otherwise, the number is
       interpreted as decimal). Use of hexadecimal and octal numbers is
       not RFC-compliant and therefore its use is discouraged.

OPTIONS         top

       -a     display all interfaces which are currently available, even
              if down

       -s     display a short list (like netstat -i)

       -v     be more verbose for some error conditions

       interface
              The name of the interface.  This is usually a driver name
              followed by a unit number, for example eth0 for the first
              Ethernet interface. If your kernel supports alias
              interfaces, you can specify them with syntax like eth0:0
              for the first alias of eth0. You can use them to assign
              more addresses. To delete an alias interface use ifconfig
              eth0:0 down.  Note: for every scope (i.e. same net with
              address/netmask combination) all aliases are deleted, if
              you delete the first (primary).

       up     This flag causes the interface to be activated.  It is
              implicitly specified if an address is assigned to the
              interface; you can suppress this behavior when using an
              alias interface by appending an - to the alias (e.g.
              eth0:0-).  It is also suppressed when using the IPv4
              0.0.0.0 address as the kernel will use this to implicitly
              delete alias interfaces.

       down   This flag causes the driver for this interface to be shut
              down.

       [-]arp Enable or disable the use of the ARP protocol on this
              interface.

       [-]promisc
              Enable or disable the promiscuous mode of the interface.
              If selected, all packets on the network will be received
              by the interface.

       [-]allmulti
              Enable or disable all-multicast mode.  If selected, all
              multicast packets on the network will be received by the
              interface.

       mtu N  This parameter sets the Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) of an
              interface.

       dstaddr addr
              Set the remote IP address for a point-to-point link (such
              as PPP).  This keyword is now obsolete; use the
              pointopoint keyword instead.

       netmask addr
              Set the IP network mask for this interface.  This value
              defaults to the usual class A, B or C network mask (as
              derived from the interface IP address), but it can be set
              to any value.

       add addr/prefixlen
              Add an IPv6 address to an interface.

       del addr/prefixlen
              Remove an IPv6 address from an interface.

       tunnel ::aa.bb.cc.dd
              Create a new SIT (IPv6-in-IPv4) device, tunnelling to the
              given destination.

       irq addr
              Set the interrupt line used by this device.  Not all
              devices can dynamically change their IRQ setting.

       io_addr addr
              Set the start address in I/O space for this device.

       mem_start addr
              Set the start address for shared memory used by this
              device.  Only a few devices need this.

       media type
              Set the physical port or medium type to be used by the
              device.  Not all devices can change this setting, and
              those that can vary in what values they support.  Typical
              values for type are 10base2 (thin Ethernet), 10baseT
              (twisted-pair 10Mbps Ethernet), AUI (external transceiver)
              and so on.  The special medium type of auto can be used to
              tell the driver to auto-sense the media.  Again, not all
              drivers can do this.

       [-]broadcast [addr]
              If the address argument is given, set the protocol
              broadcast address for this interface.  Otherwise, set (or
              clear) the IFF_BROADCAST flag for the interface.

       [-]pointopoint [addr]
              This keyword enables the point-to-point mode of an
              interface, meaning that it is a direct link between two
              machines with nobody else listening on it.
              If the address argument is also given, set the protocol
              address of the other side of the link, just like the
              obsolete dstaddr keyword does.  Otherwise, set or clear
              the IFF_POINTOPOINT flag for the interface.

       hw class address
              Set the hardware address of this interface, if the device
              driver supports this operation.  The keyword must be
              followed by the name of the hardware class and the
              printable ASCII equivalent of the hardware address.
              Hardware classes currently supported include ether
              (Ethernet), ax25 (AMPR AX.25), ARCnet and netrom (AMPR
              NET/ROM).

       multicast
              Set the multicast flag on the interface. This should not
              normally be needed as the drivers set the flag correctly
              themselves.

       address
              The IP address to be assigned to this interface.

       txqueuelen length
              Set the length of the transmit queue of the device. It is
              useful to set this to small values for slower devices with
              a high latency (modem links, ISDN) to prevent fast bulk
              transfers from disturbing interactive traffic like telnet
              too much.

       name newname
              Change the name of this interface to newname. The
              interface must be shut down first.

NOTES         top

       Since kernel release 2.2 there are no explicit interface
       statistics for alias interfaces anymore. The statistics printed
       for the original address are shared with all alias addresses on
       the same device. If you want per-address statistics you should
       add explicit accounting rules for the address using the
       iptables(8) command.

       Since net-tools 1.60-4 ifconfig is printing byte counters and
       human readable counters with IEC 60027-2 units. So 1 KiB are 2^10
       byte. Note, the numbers are truncated to one decimal (which can
       by quite a large error if you consider 0.1 PiB is
       112.589.990.684.262 bytes :)

       Interrupt problems with Ethernet device drivers fail with EAGAIN
       (SIOCSIIFLAGS: Resource temporarily unavailable) it is most
       likely a interrupt conflict. See
       http://www.scyld.com/expert/irq-conflict.html  for more
       information.

FILES         top

       /proc/net/dev
       /proc/net/if_inet6

BUGS         top

       Ifconfig uses the ioctl access method to get the full address
       information, which limits hardware addresses to 8 bytes.  Because
       Infiniband hardware address has 20 bytes, only the first 8 bytes
       are displayed correctly.  Please use ip link command from
       iproute2 package to display link layer informations including the
       hardware address.

       While appletalk DDP and IPX addresses will be displayed they
       cannot be altered by this command.

SEE ALSO         top

       route(8), netstat(8), arp(8), rarp(8), iptables(8), ifup(8),
       interfaces(5)
       http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html - Prefixes for
       binary multiples

AUTHORS         top

       Fred N. van Kempen, <waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org>
       Alan Cox, <Alan.Cox@linux.org>
       Phil Blundell, <Philip.Blundell@pobox.com>
       Andi Kleen
       Bernd Eckenfels, <net-tools@lina.inka.de>

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the net-tools (networking utilities)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://net-tools.sourceforge.net/⟩.  If you have a bug report for
       this manual page, see ⟨http://net-tools.sourceforge.net/⟩.  This
       page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.code.sf.net/p/net-tools/code⟩ on 2024-06-14.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2023-06-29.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

net-tools                      2008-10-03                    IFCONFIG(8)

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