Re: Default behaviour of 'ifconfig'

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Dec 3, 2010, at 4:01 50AM, Marc Balmer wrote:

> A cursory check on the Unix systems I run, including some Linux boxen,
> revealed that all of them but NetBSD have 'ifconfig', when called
> without arguments, default to the behaviour of 'ifconfig -a', which
> seems both natural and handy to me.

That's actually not quite what ifconfig does on Linux -- it only displays
active interfaces if no arguments are given.  With -a, it displays all
interfaces, even those that are down.  FreeBSD behaves as you describe;
it also has -u (interfaces that are up) and -d (those that are down).
> 
> Is there a particular reason NetBSD does not do this?  If the only
> reason is "lack of diff" I am more than willing to do the work.
> 
> - Marc
> 


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb