ifconfig (short for interface config) is a system administration utility in Unix-like operating systems for network interface configuration. The utility is a command-line interface tool and is also used in the system startup scripts of many operating systems. It has features for configuring, controlling, and querying TCP/IP network interface parameters. Ifconfig originally appeared in 4.2BSD as part of the BSD TCP/IP suite. Usage Common uses for ifconfig include setting the IP address and netmask of a network interface and disabling or enabling an interface. At boot time, many Unix-like operating systems initialize their network interfaces with shell scripts that call ifconfig. As an interactive tool, system administrators routinely use the utility to display and analyze network interface parameters. The following two examples show the output of the tool when querying the state of a single active interface each on a Linux-based host (interface eth0) and the ural0 interface on an OpenBSD installation. eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:20:CF:8B:42 inet addr:192.168.1.128 Bcast: Mask:255.255.255.192 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2472694671 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:44641779 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:1761467179 (1679.7 Mb) TX bytes:2870928587 (2737.9 Mb) Interrupt:28 ural0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 lladdr 00:0d:0b:ed:84:fb media: IEEE802.11 DS2 mode 11b hostap (autoselect mode 11b hostap) status: active ieee80211: nwid ARK chan 11 bssid 00:0d:0b:ed:84:fb 100dBm inet 172.30.50.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.30.50.255 inet6 fe80::20d:bff:feed:84fb%ural0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0xa HWaddr: hardware address, MAC address. The parameter txqueuelen is measured in number of Ethernet frames and is the size of the buffer that is being managed by the network scheduler. Medium access control functions ifconfig is also commonly used to change the medium access control (MAC) address of an interface. In this process, the network interface is first disabled (set down) with the ifconfig command, followed by a MAC change command: ifconfig wlan0 down ifconfig wlan0 hw ether 13:11:20:33:49:66 ifconfig wlan0 up Release status The Berkeley Software Distribution UNIX operating systems (e.g., NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD) continue active development of ifconfig and extension of its functionality to cover the configuration of wireless networking interfaces, VLAN trunking, controlling hardware features such as TSO or hardware checksumming or setting up bridge and tunnel interfaces. Solaris has historically used ifconfig for all network interface configuration, but as of Solaris 10 introduced dladm to perform data-link (OSI model layer 2) configuration, reducing ifconfig's purview to IP configuration. In older Linux distributions, ifconfig, in conjunction with the