On 04/19/12 16:40, Alex Schuster wrote: > > Thanks, that's a nice one. But can I expect this command to be available > per default on typical Linux distributions? Some other systems I have > access to have it, but here on Gentoo it belongs to sys-apps/iproute2, > which depends on nothing I have installed, I do not even know why I > emerged it in the first place. So maybe I better use ifconfig which is > always available, although sometimes in /bin and sometimes in /sbin, and > I have to check the output to see which version it is. >
Gentoo prefers it over net-tools, and a few of the conf files mention that, which explains how it could have wound up installed. (Google says) iproute2 was introduced to replace net-tools around the time of kernel-2.2, and (I says) they're needed to do anything remotely complicated with the networking stack. So, they're probably pretty standard these days.
