Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 08:53:16 -0700 From: Garrett Cooper <yanegomi@gmail.com> To: Sergey Vinogradov <boogie@lazybytes.org> Cc: FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: ifconfig output: ipv4 netmask format Message-ID: <BANLkTimtKiTTc49Aee6a-nfzKyHUoJAGNQ@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4D9F2C88.4010205@lazybytes.org> References: <4D9EFAC6.4020906@lazybytes.org> <7EA5889E-77EF-4BAE-9655-C33692A75602@bsdimp.com> <4D9F2C88.4010205@lazybytes.org>
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On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 8:40 AM, Sergey Vinogradov <boogie@lazybytes.org> wr= ote: > On 08.04.2011 19:23, Warner Losh wrote: >> >> On Apr 8, 2011, at 6:08 AM, Sergey Vinogradov wrote: >> >>> Hi, hackers. >>> I have a question: why ipv4 netmask is displayed by ifconfig in hex >>> format? Isn't dot-decimal notation more human-readable? Will the attach= ed >>> patch break something in the very bad way? >> >> This is a gratuitous change that would break scripts. =A0Hex has been us= ed >> for a very long time, and most people know how to cope. >> >> If we really wanted to make it human readable, we'd output 10.2.3.4/24 Except that developers have to resort to jumping through a few hoops to get things printed out in a format to pass into other commands that expect a dot-decimal format. One thing I've been curious about for a while that I haven't had an opportunity to look into is: what does IPV6 look like? I understand that the /netmask bit is added to the end of addresses, but what does the netmask actually look like? > So, maybe, while following the POLA, we should add an option, as Daniel > mentioned above? To output the CIDR? Eh... I don't know if doing this would be wise because it might break some 3rd party mechanisms for parsing the output (as broken as you might think it is), in particular (for example) because people can alias the ifconfig command to something else. Thanks, -Garrett
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