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Gareth
Asked: 2009-07-17 16:47:21 +0800 CST

What *nix based command can I use to find my external IP?

  • 772

Similar to a http://whatismyip.com lookup. It would obviously need to query a computer out there. Just wondering if anyone had a clever way to do it?

linux networking command-line-interface

10 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    curl http://myip.dnsomatic.com
    • 30 
  2. dig +short myip.opendns.com

    This only works if you are using OpenDNS as your dns server.

    If you aren't, one of these should work:

    dig +short myip.opendns.com @208.67.222.222
dig +short myip.opendns.com @208.67.220.220
dig +short myip.opendns.com @208.67.222.222 @208.67.220.220
    • 9

  3. STUN is the proper solution.

    % stun -v stun.ekiga.net
...
MappedAddress = 88.189.152.187:18009
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  4. You can use curl to get the page from something like whatismyip and then get the pieces out. I used whatismyipaddress.com in this example...obviously the fields will differ with different services.

    curl -s http://whatismyipaddress.com/ | grep LOOKUPADDRESS | awk '{ print $4 }'
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  5. lynx -dump http://www.pcmesh.com/ip-check.cgi | awk '/REMOTE_ADDR/{print $2}'
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  6. One must use OpenDNS' servers to use this... You can query a certain DNS server with dig like that:

    dig +short myip.opendns.com @208.67.222.222
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  7. i just run a traceroute to somewhere on the internet and look for the hop out of our local network.

    perhaps there's a better way?

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    • 1

  9. the simplest way is: curl ifconfig.me

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  10. you can use the ifconfig command to list all interfaces and their associated IP address(es).

    so, if you know your internet interface is ppp0, you can run

    $ ifconfig ppp0
ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
          inet addr:X.X.XX.X  P-t-P:Y.Y.Y.Y  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1444  Metric:1
          RX packets:198986 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:122929 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
          RX bytes:134195571 (127.9 MiB)  TX bytes:17101701 (16.3 MiB)

    X.X.X.X will be your IP address. Y.Y.Y.Y is the IP address of the next hop.

    you can then postprocess the output of ifconfig with grep/awk/sed/cut/perl/whatever to extract just the IP.

    another alternative, if you have the iproute tools installed, is to use the ip command. e.g.

    $ ip addr list ppp0
21842: ppp0:  mtu 1444 qdisc htb state UNKNOWN qlen 3
    link/ppp
    inet X.X.X.X peer Y.Y.Y.Y/32 scope global ppp0

    that's probably easier to read and certainly easier to parse:

    $ ip addr list ppp0 | awk '/inet/ {print $2}'
X.X.X.X
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