Useful Linux Networking Commands You Need To Know

Useful Linux Networking Commands Techhyme

As of writing this, Linux has a worldwide market share of more than 3% on desktops, but over 90% of all cloud infrastructure and hosting services run in this Linux OS. For this reason alone, it is crucial to be familiar with Useful Linux Networking Commands.

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Before jumping into the most useful Linux networking commands, make sure to fire up a terminal.

1. ifconfig

ifconfig command is used to display the networking information such as IP Address, Interface details, Broadcast address etc.

Command: ifconfig

2. ping

Ping command is used to know whether the remote IP is up or not. In other words, you can say that, it also helps you to identify the state of the remote host.

Command: ping x.x.x.x

3. iwconfig

iwconfig command is used to display the wireless interface details. iwconfig is similar to ifconfig, but is dedicated to wireless networking interfaces which is used to set the parameters of the network interface which are specific to the wireless operation (eg. frequency, SSID, mode etc)

Command: iwconfig

4. netstat

This command is used to display the network statistics and can also be used for network troubleshooting problems.

Command: netstat -ano

5. arp

ARP command displays IP address mapping with MAC address. In other words, it simply resolves the IP address to system’s mac address.

Command: arp -a

6. route

The route command allows you to make manual entries into the network routing tables. The route command distinguishes between routes to hosts and routes to networks by interpreting the network address of the Destination variable, which can be specified either by symbolic name or numeric address.

In other words, this command displays details of routing table.

Command: route

7. ip

ip command displays IP address, subnet mask, broadcast address etc. This command is an alternative to ifconfig command and can be used when ifconfig is not available.

Command: ip a

Command: ip n
Command: ip r

8. ss

ss command is the replacement of netcat. This command shows more information in terms of more socket statistics than netcat.

Command: ss

9. whois

whois command displays information related to IP address and domain name. The whois command searches a user name directory and displays information about the user ID or nickname specified in the Name parameter.

The whois command tries to reach ARPANET host internic.net where it examines a user-name database to obtain information.

Command: whois techhyme.com

10. hostname

This command displays the information of machine’s host name.

Command: hostname

11. curl

curl is a command-line utility for transferring data from or to a server designed to work without user interaction. With the help of curl, you can easily transfer data to or from a server, using any of the supported protocols (HTTP, FTP, IMAP, POP3, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, TFTP, TELNET, LDAP, or FILE). curl is powered by Libcurl.

Command: curl -V

12. wget

Wget is the non-interactive network downloader which is used to download files from the server even when the user has not logged on to the system and it can work in the background without hindering the current process.

Command: wget http://example.com/

13. host

host command in Linux system is used for DNS (Domain Name System) lookup operations. In other words, this command is used to find the IP address of a particular domain name or if you want to find out the domain name of a particular IP address the host command becomes handy.