No ifconfig [Was: no /etc/inittab]

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM>]

Greg Wooledge:

wooledg:~$ ip link
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether a0:8c:fd:c3:89:e0 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Parsing the interface names out of THAT is significantly harder.

In support of my earlier point that some other people did make modern ifconfig usable in such ways:

JdeBP % ifconfig -l
bge0 bge1 lo0 tun0
JdeBP %

Here's something from a script of mine:

list_available_network_interfaces() {
        case "`uname`" in
        Linux)  /bin/ls /sys/class/net ;;
        *)      ifconfig -l ;;
        esac
}

(Note that this is as loose as it is because I'm only targetting Linux-based operating systems and the BSDs so far here.  Also note that this breaks on OpenBSD which does not have the -l option to ifconfig.  Fixing that is on the to-do list.)