Haunted by ancient history

Posted Jan 8, 2015 11:06 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
Parent article: Haunted by ancient history

I had no idea that these days one better always use iw rather than iwconfig. I like the latter better as it comes with a real manpage when iw refers to own iw help output.

Haunted by ancient history

Posted Jan 8, 2015 13:26 UTC (Thu) by mm7323 (subscriber, #87386) [Link] (2 responses)

I feel the same for the ifconfig vs ip commands. The latter is much more powerful, but it is very overloaded and requires traversing multiple man pages to figure out even basic use. ifconfig 'just works', even if it has been deprecated for a long time now.

This edition's 'Quotes of the Week' from Linus seems very relevant:
"New and improved" is only really improved if it also takes backwards compatibility into account, rather than saying "now everybody must do things the new and improved - and different - way"

Haunted by ancient history

Posted Jan 8, 2015 13:58 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

In the beginning the ip command had not provided manual pages as well referring to a PDF file (or was it PS?) that was supposed to list all details in a very formal language.

Haunted by ancient history

Posted Jan 10, 2015 19:21 UTC (Sat) by ploxiln (subscriber, #58395) [Link]

I've used "ip" for a while. I like it. Maybe it's not obvious how to get started with it, but try these:

ip addr

ip link

ip link set dev eth1 up

ip addr add 10.0.1.5/24 dev eth1

ip route

ip addr del 10.0.1.5/24 dev eth1

It's easier to manage multiple IPv4 addresses on an interface with the ip command (that does work, and can be useful). It's also more obvious how to name vlan "interfaces" and such with arbitrary names.