115

How can I get my own IP address and save it to a variable in a shell script?

3
  • 6
    A word of caution: There are a lot of "works on my system" answers here that may not be portable to other environments. You have to decide if you want something that works for you or something that can be shared. Every system has multiple IPs. A portable solution answers the Q: "what IP do I use to reach blah?" A works on my system solution answers the Q: "what's my IP?" with the A: "I think you mean this one…" This should be portable unix.stackexchange.com/a/402160/9745 Apr 1, 2018 at 17:42
  • This provides a way to obtain IP address form /proc: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/365225/…
    – Pierz
    Sep 19, 2019 at 16:12
  • export IP=$(curl ifconfig.io) May 29, 2021 at 18:06

25 Answers 25

103

I believe the "modern tools" way to get your ipv4 address is to parse ip rather than ifconfig, so it'd be something like:

ip4=$(/sbin/ip -o -4 addr list eth0 | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d/ -f1)
ip6=$(/sbin/ip -o -6 addr list eth0 | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d/ -f1)

or something like that.

10
  • 5
    ip is available on all the Red Hat and Fedora distros I've used. ip is part of the iproute2 package (linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/iproute2). ifconfig and route are supposedly deprecated, although they continue to be used by a lot of people, particularly in scripts. ip is much more parsable, in my opionion.
    – jsbillings
    Mar 3, 2011 at 15:13
  • 3
    ip is also available on all Debian and Debian based distros I've seen. It's part of the iproute package which is marked as important. Mar 3, 2011 at 23:43
  • 3
    This is absolutely how it should be done, I would downvote the other answers for their use of ifconfig. ip is part of the iproute2 package which is many a distro by default. It's in most good repos to. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2
    – Baldrick
    Sep 15, 2012 at 12:13
  • 3
    @jsbillings Why /sbin/ip instead of ip?
    – l0b0
    Jan 15, 2013 at 13:02
  • 7
    This is an excellent answer! The combination of awk and cut is mildly amusing to me, here's a possible alternative which may not actually be better: ip -o -4 addr show eth0 | awk '{ split($4, ip_addr, "/"); print ip_addr[1] }'
    – Swiss
    Jun 15, 2017 at 21:21
56

Why not simply do IP=$(hostname -I) ?

12
  • 7
    hostname -i gives me just 127.0.0.1, hostname -I gives me the correct IP-Adress...
    – student
    Sep 15, 2012 at 12:41
  • 4
    No -I on FreeBSD, but you can use dig +short `hostname -f`
    – Tigger
    Jun 3, 2015 at 0:07
  • 5
    hostname -I gives me two IPs, delimited by space. Using CentOS 7.3.1611
    – amphibient
    May 16, 2017 at 16:37
  • 3
    @amphibient: Yeah, that's standard. Per its documentation, it returns all of the host's configured IP addresses (except loopback and link-local addresses). The people seeing only one IP address must be running it on a host that only has one non-loopback interface.
    – ruakh
    Jun 3, 2018 at 17:09
  • 2
    Hostname -I still allows for ambiguity. I have a lot of docker networks and hence I see: 192.168.0.33 192.168.1.106 192.168.16.1 172.23.0.1 172.17.0.1 172.24.0.1 172.26.0.1 172.18.0.1 172.27.0.1 2a02:8108:41bf:c4b0::3c00 2a02:8108:41bf:c4b0:94ab:8d54:b734:1cb0 2a02:8108:41bf:c4b0:d1bb:4aa7:7cce:b458 Only the first IP in this list is the one that I want, yet can I trust the order to always be correct?
    – k0pernikus
    Jul 30, 2020 at 12:21
38

It's not so easy if you want to take into account wlan and other alternative interfaces. If you know which interface you want the address for (e.g., eth0, the first Ethernet card), you can use this:

ip="$(ifconfig | grep -A 1 'eth0' | tail -1 | cut -d ':' -f 2 | cut -d ' ' -f 1)"

In other words, get me the network configuration information, look for eth0, get that line and the next one (-A 1), get only the last line, get the second part of that line when splitting with :, then get the first part of that when splitting with space.

8
  • 2
    I added an additional grep to your code to ignore any interface with "eth0:" in it; this now works as I expect (giving only the "eth0" IP address and not any sub-interfaces (eth0:0, eth0:1, etc.): ip="$(ifconfig | grep -v 'eth0:' | grep -A 1 'eth0' | tail -1 | cut -d ':' -f 2 | cut -d ' ' -f 1)"
    – user32250
    Feb 12, 2013 at 19:49
  • 7
    You can skip the first grep by using ifconfig eth0 Dec 1, 2014 at 16:29
  • 12
    ifconfig is deprecated, you should use ip address instead
    – alexises
    Dec 23, 2015 at 15:42
  • Maybe is deprecated but still more clear than ip
    – QkiZ
    Feb 26, 2021 at 12:39
  • 1
    @QkiZ It's not just deprecated, it doesn't even exist on Debian. Sep 22, 2021 at 7:49
35

If you want the address of an interface, the easiest way is to install moreutils then:

anthony@Zia:~$ ifdata -pa br0
172.16.1.244

ifdata answers pretty much every question you'd be tempted to parse ifconfig output for.

If you want to find out your IP address as the outside sees it (beyond any NAT, etc.), there are plenty of services that'll do it. One is fairly easy:

anthony@Zia:~$ curl ifconfig.me
173.167.51.137
5
  • Oh goodness, thank you for this answer. Never heard of moreutils before. I was seriously considering writing my own little C program to do exactly that. Feb 28, 2016 at 2:02
  • 1
    It would be nice to have ifdata added into iproute2. Maybe a new binary called ipdata
    – Swiss
    Jun 15, 2017 at 21:25
  • 2
    ifdata is good BUT it doesn't supports ipv6. Jul 6, 2017 at 11:29
  • 1
    Some parsing may still be nesssisary if you don't know your default interface name: ifdata -pa $(ip route list | grep default | awk '{print $5}')
    – Jay
    Sep 8, 2020 at 13:56
  • 1
    This is the one.
    – progonkpa
    Aug 25, 2022 at 10:29
26

I don't mean to be a jerk, but there really is a right way and this is it. You trim the output of ip route to get only the source IP. Depending on what IP you are trying to reach, "my own ip address" (OP's words) will be different. If you care about reaching the public internet, using Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS server is pretty standard. So...

The short answer is:

ip route get 8.8.8.8 | sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p;q}'

Here's the detailed explanation

If I want the ip I use to reach the internet, I use this:

pi@et3:~ $ ip route get 8.8.8.8 | sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p;q}'
10.55.0.200

If I want the ip I use to reach something on my VPN, I use this:

pi@et3:~ $ ip route get 172.31.0.100 | sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p;q}'
172.29.0.9

This next one is really just for illustrative purposes. But, it should work on any Linux system. So, you can use this to demonstrate that, yes, all machines have multiple IP addresses at all times.

If I wanted the ip I use to reach myself, I would use this:

pi@et3:~ $ my_ip=$(getent hosts $(cat /etc/hostname) | awk '{print $1; exit}')
pi@et3:~ $ ip route get $my_ip | sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p;q}'
127.0.0.1

More about that sed command

First let me say that when choosing unix tools, you try to choose the tools that require the fewest pipes. So, while some answers will pipe ifconfig to grep to sed to head, that is rarely ever necessary. When you see it, it should raise a red flag that you are taking advice from someone with little experience. That doesn't make the "solution" wrong. But, it probably could use some streamlining.

I have chosen sed because it is more terse than the same workflow in awk. (I have since an awk example below.) I don't think any other tool but those 2 would be appropriate.

Let's examine what sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p;q}' does:

sed            # the sed executable located via $PATH
-n             # no output unless explicitly requested
'              # begin the command space
/src/          # regex match the string 'src'
{              # begin a block of commands **
s/             # begin a substitution (match)
  .*src *      # match anything leading up to and including src and any number of spaces
  \([^ ]*\)    # define a group containing any number of non spaces
  .*           # match any trailing characters (which will begin with a space because of the previous rule).
/              # begin the substitution replacement
  \1           # reference the content in the first defined group
/              # end the substitution
p              # print (explicitly, remember) the result
;              # designate the end of the command
q              # quit
}              # end the block of commands
'              # end the command space

** all of which will be performed "on match"
  - otherwise only the first command to following the match would be performed "on match"
    - any other commands would be performed whether there was a match or not
Note:

I used to use sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *//p;q}' but a commenter pointed out that some systems have trailing data after the src field.

Using awk

ip route get 8.8.8.8 | \
    awk '{gsub(".*src",""); print $1; exit}'

# or

ip route get 8.8.8.8 | \
    awk '{for(i=1; i<NF; i++){if($i=="src"){i++; print $i; exit}}}'

More about my network

My ifconfig shows that I have tun0 for my VPN and eth0 for my lan.

pi@et3:~ $ ifconfig
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 10.55.0.200  netmask 255.255.252.0  broadcast 10.55.3.255
        inet6 fe80::71e6:5d7c:5b4b:fb25  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether b8:27:eb:b2:96:84  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1  (Local Loopback)

tun0: flags=4305<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,NOARP,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 172.29.0.9  netmask 255.255.255.255  destination 172.29.0.10
        inet6 fe80::3a8e:8195:b86c:c68c  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        unspec 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  txqueuelen 100  (UNSPEC)

wlan0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether b8:27:eb:e7:c3:d1  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
9
  • ip route get 8.8.8.8 | sed -n '/src/{s/.*src *//p;q}' gave me 10.1.2.3 uid 1002. So I add to append | awk '{print $1}' to keep only the IP address.
    – wisbucky
    Apr 23, 2019 at 21:40
  • 2
    @wisbucky I never pipe sed/awk/grep to each other in recorded code. (I will use it on the command line when I'm in a hurry, but you will never find it written to disk other than in my ~/.bash_history) I updated the answer to use awk and it solves this issue. Apr 24, 2019 at 15:30
  • 3
    @wisbucky I couldn't stand it. I made my sed work with your environment too. Apr 24, 2019 at 16:05
  • 1
    Note (as suggested elsewhere) jq -j route get 8.8.8.8 | jq .[].prefsrc involves just as few pipes but is much less vulnerable to subtle variations in output format and much easier to understand than the sed recipe. The only wrinkle is that busybox's version of ip doesn't support JSON output.
    – Tom
    Sep 14, 2021 at 11:52
  • 1
    @Tom: nice approach! NB: please note you have a typo: the first jq -j should of course be ip -j. Nov 27, 2021 at 22:09
23

To get IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and not assume the main interface is eth0 (these days em1 is more common), try:

ips=$(ip -o addr show up primary scope global |
      while read -r num dev fam addr rest; do echo ${addr%/*}; done)
  • -o uses the one-line output format, which is easier to process with read, grep, etc.
  • up excludes devices that aren't active
  • scope global excludes private/local addresses such as 127.0.0.1 and fe80::/64
  • primary excludes temporary addresses (assuming you want an address that doesn't change)
2
  • 2
    This has to be the best answer because 1) it doesn't assumes a device name, 2) it uses 'ip' as opposed to old school 'ifconfig', and 3) it supports ipv6 as well. Jul 6, 2017 at 11:31
  • 1
    I agreed, it the best start for most use cases. You can pass -4/-6 to filter address types. You can also easily get other interface parameters. Personally, I dislike while loop and I prefer grep -o 'inet6\? [0-9a-f\.:]*' | cut -f 2 -d ' ' May 18, 2018 at 7:42
14

Depends what you mean by own IP address. Systems have IP addresses on several subnets (sometimes several per subnet), some of which IPv4, some IPv6 using devices like ethernet adapters, loopback interfaces, VPN tunnels, bridges, virtual interfaces...

I you mean the IP address by which another given device may reach your computer, you have to find out which subnet that is, and which version of IP we're talking about. Also, bear in mind that because of NAT performed by firewall/routers, the IP address of an interface may not be the same as a remote host sees an incoming connection from your computer coming from.

When there is fancy source routing or per protocol/port routing it can be difficult to find out which interface would be used to talk to one remote computer over a given protocol and even then, there's no guarantee that the IP address of that interface may be directly addressable by the remote computer wanting to establish a new connection to your computer.

For IPv4 (probably works for IPv6 as well), a trick that works in many unices including Linux to find out the IP address of the interface used to reach a given host is to use a connect(2) on a UDP socket and use getsockname():

For instance, on my home computer:

perl -MSocket -le '
  socket(S, PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, getprotobyname("udp"));
  connect(S, sockaddr_in(1, inet_aton("8.8.8.8")));
  print inet_ntoa((sockaddr_in(getsockname(S)))[1]);'

Would be used to find out the IP address of the interface via which I would reach 8.8.8.8 (google's DNS server). It would return something like "192.168.1.123" which is the address of the interface for the default route to the internet. However, google wouldn't see a DNS request from my machine as coming from that IP address which is a private one, as there's NAT performed by my home broadband router.

connect() on a UDP socket doesn't send any packet (UDP is connection-less), but prepares the socket by querying the routing table.

On Linux and with recent versions of iproute2 and a json parsing tool like jq, you should be able to get something similar with:

ip    -j route get 8.8.8.8              | jq -r '.[].prefsrc' # IPv4
ip -6 -j route get 2001:4860:4860::8888 | jq -r '.[].prefsrc' # IPv6

Beware the openvpn when configured to force traffic through the tunnel adds two routes for 0.0.0.0/1 and 128.0.0.0/1 instead of one default (0.0.0.0/0) route, so the approaches that query the default route don't work in that case.

7
ipa=$(ip route get 8.8.8.8| grep src| sed 's/.*src \(.*\)$/\1/g')

ipa=$(hostname -i|cut -f2 -d ' ')
2
  • 1
    Using -I instead of -i is better as you would want to ignore loopback adresses, so the final command would be ipa=$(hostname -I|cut -f1 -d ' ')
    – Karl.S
    Oct 17, 2017 at 22:00
  • 2
    If grep isn't enough, don't pipe it to something else. Just use the something else (sed, awk, etc.). Aug 11, 2018 at 16:58
6

Since I don't think anyone has mentioned this option here:

$ ip -f inet -json addr list | jq -r '.[] | select(length>0) | .addr_info[].local'

Explanation:

ip can produce JSON output which you can then query with jq. .[] means "each member of the array that was returned". select(length>0) does pretty much what it says but is only really useful if you specify an interface name to ip, in which case it returns empty objects for each interface that didn't match. .addr_info[].local means print the local IP address of each addr_info member of each object that survived the select.

It's worth having a look at the output of ip -json addr list | jq . to see what other information you can query for in this way.

Edit This also returns the loopback address. If you don't want that:

$ ip -f inet -json addr list | jq -r '.[] | select(length>0) | select(.flags | index("LOOPBACK") | not) | .addr_info[].local'

However, note that many systems will still return many IP addresses and it's not obvious how to tell which is the "right" one. My system, for instance, returns about a dozen addresses, mostly created by Docker.

If by "my own IP address" you mean the IPv4 address on a local interface through which you access the internet, try this:

$ my_ip=$(ip -j route get 8.8.8.8 | jq -r '.[0].prefsrc')

ip -j route get 8.8.8.8 is asking the kernel, "Suppose I wanted to get a packet to the host at 8.8.8.8; how would you get it there?" 8.8.8.8 is Google's DNS server so it seems fairly likely you're going to get to it via your internet connection.

jq -r '.[0].prefsrc' is the source address that would be attached to the packet.

If you don't have an internet connection, my_ip will be empty after this. You can also check for this explicitly:

route_info=$(ip -j route get 8.8.8.8)
if [[ ! $? ]]; then
  echo "You have no internet connection."
  exit
fi
my_ip = $(echo ${route_info} | jq -r '.[0].prefsrc')
2
  • this gave me also 127.0.0.1. Worked answer unix.stackexchange.com/a/643507/37431
    – rofrol
    Oct 29, 2021 at 19:22
  • It's not immediately obvious why the answer you linked doesn't also return the loopback address. I'll update this answer with a better way.
    – Tom
    Nov 2, 2021 at 14:55
2

Assuming that you may have various interfaces of various name but that you want the first non-localhost one and non-ipv6, you may try:

ip=`ip addr show |grep "inet " |grep -v 127.0.0. |head -1|cut -d" " -f6|cut -d/ -f1`
1
  • ip=$(ifconfig | grep -oP '(?<=inet addr:)\S*' | grep -v 127)
    – rcjohnson
    Nov 17, 2015 at 17:12
2

You should use ip (instead of ifconfig) as it's current, maintained, and perhaps most importantly for scripting purposes, it produces a consistent & parsable output. Following are a few similar approaches:

If you want the IPv4 address for your Ethernet interface eth0:

$ ip -4 -o addr show eth0 | awk '{print $4}'
192.168.1.166/24  

As a script:

$ INTFC=eth0  
$ MYIPV4=$(ip -4 -o addr show $INTFC | awk '{print $4}') 
$ echo $MYIPV4
192.168.1.166/24

The output produced above is in CIDR notation. If CIDR notation isn't wanted, it can be stripped:

$ ip -4 -o addr show eth0 | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d "/" -f 1 
192.168.1.166  

Another option that IMHO is "most elegant" gets the IPv4 address for whatever interface is used to connect to the specified remote host (8.8.8.8 in this case). Courtesy of @gatoatigrado in this answer:

$ ip route get 8.8.8.8 | awk '{ print $7; exit }'
192.168.1.166

See NOTE 1 below

As a script:

$ RHOST=8.8.8.8  
$ MYIP=$(ip route get $RHOST | awk '{ print $7; exit }')
$ echo $MYIP
192.168.1.166

See NOTE 1 below

This works perfectly well on a host with a single interface, but more advantageously will also work on hosts with multiple interfaces and/or route specifications.

ip would be my preferred approach, but it's certainly not the only way to skin this cat. Here's another approach that uses hostname if you prefer something easier/more concise:

$ hostname --all-ip-addresses | awk '{print $1}'  

Or, if you want the IPv6 address:

$ hostname --all-ip-addresses | awk '{print $2}'  

NOTE 1: The output of ip route get has changed since this answer was posted. The ip addr is no longer at $NF; it is now located at $7.

1

Assuming you need your primary public IP as it seen from the rest of the world, try any of those:

wget http://ipecho.net/plain -O - -q
curl http://icanhazip.com
curl http://ifconfig.me/ip
1

Simple Command to fine IP Address with default interface.

ip route | grep src | awk '{print $NF; exit}'

Tested on All Unix OS

1
  • What about ip route get 1 | awk '{print $NF;exit}' ? Even shorter May 29, 2020 at 7:49
1

If you're looking for a public IP address of the box, you could use the following:

  • dig @ns1.google.com -t txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com +short | tr -d \"

You could use dig(1) options like -4 or -6 to specifically look for an IPv4 or IPv6 address; Google will provide an answer in a record of TXT type, which will have quotes around it when presented by dig; if you want to subsequently use the variable with utilities like traceroute, you gotta use something like tr(1) to remove said quotes.

Other options include whoami.akamai.net and myip.opendns.com, which answer with A and AAAA records (instead of TXT as in the above example from Google), so, they don't require having the quotes removed:

  • dig -4 @ns1-1.akamaitech.net -t a whoami.akamai.net +short

  • dig -4 @resolver1.opendns.com -t any myip.opendns.com +short

  • dig -6 @resolver1.opendns.com -t any myip.opendns.com +short

Here's a sample script that uses all the options above to set the variables:

#!/bin/sh
IPANY="$(dig @ns1.google.com -t txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com +short | tr -d \")"
GOOGv4="$(dig -4 @ns1.google.com -t txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com +short | tr -d \")"
GOOGv6="$(dig -6 @ns1.google.com -t txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com +short | tr -d \")"
AKAMv4="$(dig -4 @ns1-1.akamaitech.net -t a whoami.akamai.net +short)"
CSCOv4="$(dig -4 @resolver1.opendns.com -t a myip.opendns.com +short)"
CSCOv6="$(dig -6 @resolver1.opendns.com -t aaaa myip.opendns.com +short)"
printf '$GOOG:\t%s\t%s\t%s\n' "${IPANY}" "${GOOGv4}" "${GOOGv6}"
printf '$AKAM:\t%s\n$CSCO:\t%s\t%s\n' "${AKAMv4}" "${CSCOv4}" "${CSCOv6}"

If you're looking for a private IP address, or for a set of all IP addresses assigned to the box, you could use some combination of ifconfig (on BSD and GNU/Linux), ip addr (on GNU/Linux), hostname (options -i and -I on GNU/Linux) and netstat to see what's going on.

1

Shortest but not foolproof way (supposing the system have 'iproute2' installed):

ip route get 1.1.1.1 | awk '{print $7;exit}'

Explanation: Here we are trying to reach a real and reachable (Cloudflare) IP address, that latest versions of ip command should return something like:

1.1.1.1 via <your router> dev <your network device> src <your ip address!> uid <uid of your user>

So, what the one-liner mentioned above tries to do is to get the nth field, if this is the actual output you get.

As it's not garanteed you are going to have the same output in every system, we are better off catching some errors with a more robust version:

IP=$(ip route get 1.1.1.1 | awk '{print $7; exit}')

if [ -a "${IP}" ]; then
  echo "unable to determine the IP address"
else
  echo "Your IP address is \"${IP}\""
fi
3
  • 1
    Perhaps you could add an example of the raw output of the ip command, so that people can better understand why it works (and the site's algorithms don't put it in my "Low quality post" review queue ... ;) )
    – AdminBee
    May 29, 2020 at 8:13
  • 1
    gave me 1000 instead of ip. 1.0.0.0 via 192.168.0.1 dev wlo1 src 192.168.0.16 uid 1000
    – rofrol
    Oct 29, 2021 at 19:20
  • The output of ip route get has changed. Two additional fields have been added for uid, and so now $NF returns the uid instead of the IP address. The IP address is now in $7.
    – Seamus
    Mar 24, 2022 at 8:07
0

I use this one-liner:

IP=$(/sbin/ifconfig | grep -e "inet:" -e "addr:" | grep -v "inet6" | grep -v "127.0.0.1" | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -c6-)

Uses ifconfig (widely available), does not take localhost address, does not bind you to a given interface name, does not take into account IPv6 and tries to get the IP of the first network interface available.

0
myip=$(curl -kLs "http://api.ipify.org")

or

myip=$(wget -q "http://api.ipify.org" -O -)
0

all the solutions using awk/sed/grep seem overly complex and ugly for my situation... so i came up with this really simple solution BUT beware cus it makes some assumptions, namely the assumption that the LAST interface is the one you're interested. if you're ok with that then this is pretty clean:

ifconfig | awk '/net / { x = $2 } END { print x }'

otherwise you could do some silly if statement to test for a specific prefix or whatever criteria you may have.

0

This will print the IP of the connection that is currently UP:

ip -4 -j a | jq -r '.[] | select(.operstate=="UP") | .addr_info[].local'

ip -4 -j a - show IPv4 addresses in JSON format

jq -r '.[] | select(.operstate=="UP") | .addr_info[].local' - find a object that has "operstate": "UP", and retrieve a local property value (which is in the addr_info array).

Flag -r for jq means "show raw output".

0

This answer offered to this "duplicate" question:

1. private ip addr:

The ip command is one way to get your private IP addr:

$ ip route get 8.8.8.8      # 8.8.8.8 is Google's DNS server
8.8.8.8 via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0 src 192.168.1.144 uid 1000
$

You can probably figure what each field means, but the one that answers your question is the IP addr following src: 192.168.1.144. The advantage of this approach is that it works on systems with more than one interface (e.g. wlan0 & eth0), and it chooses the interface & IP addr actually used to reach the destination 8.8.8.8

You could script this as follows:

...
MYIP=$(ip route get 8.8.8.8 | awk '{ print $7; exit }')
echo "Your private ip is: $MYIP" 
...

An alternative is using hostname; simpler if you know which interface is used & don't care about the route info:

hostname --all-ip-addresses
192.168.1.144

public ip addr

To get your public IP addr, you will need some "outside help" - an external server that simply returns the IP address it sees when you access it. I compiled a list of these servers on GitHub some time ago that you're welcome to try - I only tested one of them just now & it worked. Some of the other sites in the list will require some parsing to get the IP addr, but this one is straightforward:

$ curl ifconfig.me && echo
AAA.BB.CCC.DDD

Or, in a script


MYXIP=$(curl ifconfig.me)
echo "My external IP addr is: $MYXIP" 

-1

I needed to do this within an alias to start a radio server on my wired NIC. I used

ip addr | egrep -i "inet.+eth1" | awk -F[\ /] '{print $6}' | tr -d [:space:]
1
  • 1
    egrep is depreciated. Use grep -E instead.
    – Yokai
    Jan 25, 2018 at 9:23
-1

Some commands are working on centos 6 or 7, the below command working on both,

#!/bin/sh

serverip=`/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet" | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'NR==1' | cut -d':' -f2`

echo $serverip
2
  • 1
    that's way too much grep | awk | awk . line can be shortened to /sbin/ifconfig eth0 | awk '$1 == "inet" { print substr($2,6); next ; } '
    – Archemar
    Aug 6, 2015 at 11:23
  • I accepted, can you check both centos6 and 7?. centos 7.x /sbin/ifconfig eth0 | awk '$1 == "inet" { print substr($2,6); next ; }' 35.104.41 centos6.x (Working fine) /sbin/ifconfig eth0 | awk '$1 == "inet" { print substr($2,6); next ; }' 192.168.0.1 Aug 7, 2015 at 4:32
-1

This snippet avoids hard-coding the device name (like 'eth0') and will use ip instead of ifconfig:

/sbin/ip addr | grep 'state UP' -A2 | tail -n1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1  -d'/'

It will return the IP of the first active device listed in the output of ip addr. Depending on your machine, this can be an ipv4 or ipv6 address.

To store it into a variable, use:

ip=$(/sbin/ip addr | grep 'state UP' -A2 | tail -n1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1  -d'/')
-1

This may not be the most robust or correct solution, but unlike most of the other solutions, the command works on both Linux and Mac (BSD).

host `hostname` | awk '{print $NF}'
-4
hostname -I >> file_name 

this will do everything you want

3
  • hostname: invalid option -- 'l'...
    – jasonwryan
    Dec 23, 2015 at 6:56
  • That's a capital i. Seems to work fine although it apparently prints IP addresses of all interfaces.
    – Joe
    Dec 23, 2015 at 7:04
  • 2
    it is proposed in one of the previous answers. Also it does not store the IP in the variable. So what is the point of this answer?
    – Jakuje
    Dec 23, 2015 at 8:10

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