Yes, this is key, and why ip is so terrible for the way I currently work. No doubt I'll have to get used to it, like those stupid biosdevname interfaces.
90% of my machines don't have more than 1 IP per physical interface, the rest are aliases
ifconfig outputs clear whitespace, so picking out the specific details of
- interface name
- ip address
Is far easier. I do prefer /28 to 255.255.255.240 when specifying subnets, but it does make it far harder to scan what the IP is. I suspect the people writing the utilities are the ones who are able to automate everything, as they do the same job 1000 times, with IP in, IP out, and no concern about physical devices, so rarely use the tool to read data, certainly not as a human.
You've then got the "what's the default gateway" problem
route -n
shows it nice and easy
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
0.0.0.0 172.26.32.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
172.26.32.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.240.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
ip route -n
Command "-n" is unknown, try "ip route help".
It's all good having tools to manage lots of ip namespaces etc, that's great in the subset of cases you need that functionality, but for those of us that manage physical machines with physical inputs/outputs, rather than datacenter scale devices, it's a right pain.