As someone who's run hosts with hundreds of aliases (on solaris mind you),
the fact that ifconfig <interface> returns just the interface (and not the
aliases) is handy. As someone pointed out this should always return the MAC
as well (and not use the stupid solaris'ism of only doing that if root is
running the ifconfig...).

However, ifconfig -a should return everything (including aliases) as that's
the reasonable expectation of someone running the command. (i.e. I'd expect
"all" to mean "all" as it implies).

James

>
>| 	  it is, IMHO, confusing (and i got comments from others, including
>| 	  jinmei - cc'ed).  is it okay to always print aliases, and say
>| 	  good bye to -A? (i.e. -A is the default behavior)
>
>A long time ago I asked why we have the current behavior.
>I was told that some people had hosts with hundreds of alias addresses
>(web servers, etc.), and that they desired "ifconfig -a" to produce
>reasonably scalable output.
>
>I am really unsure that this change is wise.
>
>It might be important to provide a way to not list aliases.
>But maybe not?
>
>--jhawk
>
>
>
>