TIPC(8)

📦
version 7.3.0 · 2 versions
, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, centos-stream 10, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, ubuntu stonking

💖 TIPC(8) 💖

okay bestie, buckle up, this is the tipc page from section 8 of the Linux manual — it's the TIPC configuration and management tool, and yes she's iconic, yes she's been around forever, and yes we're gonna get through the whole thing together 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tipc [ OPTIONS ] COMMAND ARGUMENTS

COMMAND := { bearer | link | media | nametable | node | socket }

OPTIONS := { -h[help] }

that's it, that's the shape of every call you'll ever make. no cap 💅

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the Transparent Inter-Process Communication protocol — TIPC for short, we don't do full names in this house — gives you total address transparency between processes. which literally means apps chillin' in a clustered computer environment can talk to each other quickly and reliably no matter where they're standing inside the cluster. like, you don't need to know where they live, you just yell and they answer. it's giving telepathy fr fr 😭✨

TIPC was born at the telecom manufacturer Ericsson. the very first open source version dropped in 2000, when Ericsson released its first Linux version of TIPC. then in 2006 TIPC got introduced into the mainline Linux kernel, and now it's widely used both inside and outside of Ericsson. glow up of the century, honestly 👑

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -h, --help — shows help about the last given command. like, tipc bearer --help will show bearer help, and tipc --help will show general help. and the position of the option in the string? irrelevant, she does not care where you put her 💅
  • -j, -json — outputs results in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). machine-readable realness ✨
  • -p, -pretty — okay so the default JSON format is compact and more efficient to parse, but it's genuinely hard for most users to read. this flag adds indentation for readability. your eyes will thank you 🥰

👑 COMMANDS 👑

  • BEARER — Show or modify TIPC bearers
  • LINK — Show or modify TIPC links
  • MEDIA — Show or modify TIPC media
  • NAMETABLE — Show TIPC nametable
  • NODE — Show or modify TIPC node parameters
  • SOCKET — Show TIPC sockets

six commands, six little icons in the group chat 🦋

🌈 ARGUMENTS 🌈

command arguments are described in a command specific man page, and they typically consist of nested commands plus key value pairs. if you give no arguments, a command will typically just show its own help text — she's polite like that 🫶

the explicit help option -h or --help can show up anywhere among the arguments, and it will show help for the last valid command given. so you can just sprinkle it wherever, it'll figure it out. lowkey genius.

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

exit status is 0 if the command was successful, or a positive integer upon failure. that's the whole vibe check: zero means slay, anything else means something went sideways 😭

🍓 SEE ALSO 🍓

go read those too, they're the sequels, the extended universe, the whole franchise 💜

🙈 REPORTING BUGS 🙈

found a bug? report it to the Network Developers mailing list <netdev@vger.kernel.org> — that's where the development and maintenance is primarily done. and good news bestie: you do not have to be subscribed to the list to send a message there. just yeet it in there ✨

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Richard Alpe <richard.alpe@ericsson.com>

okay that's the whole page, you ate it, you understood it, you're basically a TIPC main character now 🌟 this was brought to you by iproute2, dated 02 Jun 2015 — yeah she's an elder but she still serves, and honestly? obsessed. periodt 💅🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from