IP(8)

✨ NAME ✨

Okay so the manual name here is ip, and it's the Swiss Army knife for networking 🔪✨. It lets you show and manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnels. Literally everything networky, bestie 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

Here's how you call it 🫶

ip [ OPTIONS ] OBJECT { COMMAND | help }

ip [ -force ] -batch filename

OBJECT := { address | addrlabel | fou | help | ila | ioam | l2tp | link
        | macsec | maddress | monitor | mptcp | mroute | mrule |
        neighbor | neighbour | netconf | netns | nexthop | ntable | ntbl
        | route | rule | sr | tap | tcpmetrics | token | tunnel | tuntap
        | vrf | xfrm }

OPTIONS := { -V[ersion] | -h[uman-readable] | -s[tatistics] | -d[etails]
        | -r[esolve] | -iec | -f[amily] { inet | inet6 | link } | -4 |
        -6 | -B | -0 | -l[oops] { maximum-addr-flush-attempts } |
        -o[neline] | -rc[vbuf] [size] | -t[imestamp] | -ts[hort] |
        -n[etns] name | -N[umeric] | -a[ll] | -c[olor] | -br[ief] |
        -j[son] | -p[retty] }

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

Okay, these are the flags you can slap on the end of your command 💖

• -V, -Version — Prints the version of the ip utility and then exits. Bye bye 👋
• -h, -human, -human-readable — Shows statistics with human readable values, followed by a suffix. So much easier to read 🥹
• -b, -batch <FILENAME> — Reads commands from the file you give it (or standard input) and runs them. Heads up: the first failure kills ip dead 💀
• -force — Don't terminate ip on errors in batch mode 🙈 But if any errors happened while running the commands, the return code of the application will be non zero, so you'll still know something went wrong.
• -s, -stats, -statistics — Outputs more info. Repeat it twice or more and the info keeps growing 📈 As a rule, the extra stuff is statistics or some time values.
• -d, -details — Outputs more detailed info 🔍
• -l, -loops <COUNT> — Sets the max number of loops the ip address flush logic will try before giving up. The default is 10. Zero (0) means keep looping until every address is gone 🧹
• -f, -family <FAMILY> — Picks the protocol family to use. It can be inet, inet6, bridge, mpls or link. If you skip this, the family gets guessed from your other arguments. If there still isn't enough info to guess, ip falls back to the default one, which is usually inet or any. Oh, and link is a special one that means no networking protocol is involved at all 🦋
• -4 — shortcut for -family inet
• -6 — shortcut for -family inet6
• -B — shortcut for -family bridge
• -M — shortcut for -family mpls
• -0 — shortcut for -family link
• -o, -oneline — Outputs each record on a single line, swapping line feeds for the \ character. This is so convenient when you want to count records with wc(1) or search them with grep(1) 🧚
• -r, -resolve — Uses the system's name resolver to print DNS names instead of host addresses 🌐
• -n, -netns <NETNS> — Switches ip to the network namespace you name, NETNS. This is basically a shortcut for the long way of running it. So instead of typing this:

ip netns exec NETNS ip [ OPTIONS ] OBJECT { COMMAND | help }

you can just type this:

ip -n[etns] NETNS [ OPTIONS ] OBJECT { COMMAND | help }

• -N, -Numeric — Prints the number of the protocol, scope, dsfield, etc. directly, instead of turning it into a human readable name 🔢
• -a, -all — Runs the specified command over all objects. Whether it works depends on if the command supports this option 🤷‍♀️
• -c[color][={always|auto|never} — Configures color output 🌈 If you leave the parameter out, or pick always, color output is on no matter what stdout is doing. If you pick auto, stdout gets checked to see if it's a terminal before color turns on. If you pick never, color is off. If you use this flag more than once, the last one wins. This flag gets ignored if -json is also given.

The color palette can be influenced by the COLORFGBG environment variable (see ENVIRONMENT).

• -t, -timestamp — Displays the current time when you use the monitor option ⏰
• -ts, -tshort — Same as -timestamp, but with a shorter format ⏱️
• -rc, -rcvbuf<SIZE> — Sets the netlink socket receive buffer size. It defaults to 1MB 📦
• -iec — Prints human readable rates in IEC units (e.g. 1Ki = 1024) 🧮
• -br, -brief — Prints only the basic info in a tabular format, which is way easier to read. Right now this only works with ip addr show, ip link show & ip neigh show 📋
• -j, -json — Outputs results in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) 💜
• -p, -pretty — The default JSON format is compact and super efficient to parse, but honestly kinda hard for most humans to read. This flag adds indentation so it's readable 🎀
• -echo — Asks the kernel to send the applied configuration back to you 🪞

✨ IP - COMMAND SYNTAX ✨

🦋 OBJECT

These are the things you can poke at 👀

• address — a protocol (IP or IPv6) address on a device 🏠
• addrlabel — label configuration for protocol address selection 🏷️
• fou — Foo-over-UDP receive port configuration 🌊
• ila — manages identifier locator addresses (ILA) 📍
• ioam — manages IOAM namespaces and IOAM schemas 🧩
• l2tp — tunnels ethernet over IP (L2TPv3) 🚇
• link — a network device 🔌
• macsec — MACsec device configuration 🔐
• maddress — a multicast address 📣
• monitor — watches for netlink messages 👀
• mptcp — manages the MPTCP path manager 🛤️
• mroute — a multicast routing cache entry 🗺️
• mrule — a rule in the multicast routing policy database 📜
• neighbour — manages ARP or NDISC cache entries 🤝
• netconf — network configuration monitoring 📡
• netns — manages network namespaces 🫧
• nexthop — manages nexthop objects ➡️
• ntable — manages the neighbor cache's operation 🧠
• route — a routing table entry 🛣️
• rule — a rule in the routing policy database 📏
• sr — manages IPv6 segment routing 🧭
• stats — manages and shows interface statistics 📊
• tcp_metrics/tcpmetrics — manages TCP Metrics 📈
• token — manages tokenized interface identifiers 🪙
• tunnel — a tunnel over IP 🕳️
• tuntap — manages TUN/TAP devices 🐚
• vrf — manages virtual routing and forwarding devices 🏰
• xfrm — manages IPSec policies 🔒

The names of all objects can be written in full or abbreviated. For example, address can be shortened to addr or just a ✂️

💅 COMMAND

This is the action you want to do to the object 🎯 The list of possible actions depends on the object type. As a rule, you can add, delete and show (or list) objects, but some objects don't allow all of these or have some extra commands of their own. The help command works for all objects and prints out a list of the available commands and the argument syntax conventions 📖

If you don't give a command, a default one gets assumed. Usually that's list, or help if the objects of that class can't be listed 🫶

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• COLORFGBG — If it's set, its value is used to figure out whether the background is dark or light, and then contrast colors get used. The COLORFGBG environment variable usually has either two or three values separated by semicolons, and we only care about the last value. If that value is 0-6 or 8, colors suitable for a dark background get chosen 🌙

Here's a cute example:

COLORFGBG=";0" ip -c a

🚦 EXIT STATUS 🚦

The exit status is 0 if the command worked ✅ It's 1 if there's a syntax error 🙅‍♀️ If the kernel reported an error, the exit status is 2 💀

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

• ip addr — Shows the addresses assigned to all network interfaces 🏡
• ip neigh — Shows the current neighbour table in the kernel 👯
• ip link set x up — Brings up interface x 🟢
• ip link set x down — Brings down interface x 🔴
• ip route — Shows the table routes 🗺️

📜 HISTORY 📜

ip was written by Alexey N. Kuznetsov and added in Linux 2.2. Legend behavior fr 👑

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

Here's where to go for more: ip-address(8), ip-addrlabel(8), ip-fou(8), ip-ioam(8), ip-l2tp(8), ip-link(8), ip-macsec(8), ip-maddress(8), ip-monitor(8), ip-mptcp(8), ip-mroute(8), ip-neighbour(8), ip-netconf(8), ip-netns(8), ip-nexthop(8), ip-ntable(8), ip-route(8), ip-rule(8), ip-sr(8), ip-stats(8), ip-tcp_metrics(8), ip-token(8), ip-tunnel(8), ip-vrf(8), ip-xfrm(8), and the IP Command reference ip-cref.ps 📚

🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

If you find a bug, report it to the Network Developers mailing list at netdev@vger.kernel.org. That's where the development and maintenance is mainly done 💌 You don't have to be subscribed to the list to send a message there, so no excuses 🙈

👩‍💻 AUTHOR 👩‍💻

Original Manpage by Michail Litvak <mci@owl.openwall.com> 🫶

---

Okay bestie that's the whole tea ☕💖 iproute2 · 20 Dec 2011 · IP(8) — periodt 💅✨