How can I get the address of my local machine?

Question

I'm on a macbook running Lion. In Terminal I'm connected to my schools server with ssh. I navigated to a folder on the server and have a file I want to copy to my local machine, but I don't know what the IP address of my local machine is. How can I get it? I'm in the folder on the server, and I want to copy read.txt onto my local machine's hard drive. I've tried scp ./read.txt [my computer name].local/newRead.txt but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

You don't need to know your own host's IP address in order to copy files to it. Simply use scp to copy the file from the remote host:

$ scp user@rhost.com:path/to/read.txt ~/path/to/newRead.txt

If you want to copy to your local host from your remote host, get your own IP address with ifconfig and issue the following:

$ scp path/to/read.txt user@1.2.3.4:path/to/newRead.txt

where 1.2.3.4 is your local IP address. A convenient way to extract a host's IP address is using this function:

ipaddr() { (awk '{print $2}' <(ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet ')); }

where eth0 is your network interface. Stick it in ~/.bash_profile in order to run it as a regular command - ipaddr.

Answer 2

Try ifconfig. It should tell you your local IP address (on your network) for the various interfaces like WiFi and Ethernet.