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Comment by iod | Hacker News Reader

TIL: iproute2 has a color, a brief/human mode, and a one-line mode. I think I am going to be aliasing ip -color to ip from now on.

$ ip -br -c a # ip -brief -color address

  lo     UNKNOWN  127.0.0.1/8 ::1/128 
  eth0   DOWN
  wlan0  UP       192.0.2.1/24 2001:db8::1/64 fe80::1/64

$ ip -br -c l # ip -brief -color link

  lo     UNKNOWN  00:00:00:00:00:00 <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> 
  eth0   DOWN     00:12:34:56:78:9a <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> 
  wlan0  UP       12:34:56:78:9a:bc <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP>

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This is a good reminder that defaults should be simple and human readable.

Advanced options should be behind flags for power users, not the other way around.

Indeed. I don't get it why `ip` has -brief which is not a default behavior and why -verbose flag does not exist. Also there could be a -no-color instead of -color flag.

Or simply detect when piped and leave the color out, as just about every sane cli tool does it.

Spot on. A good pattern is to autodetect what to do by default and yet allow forcing on/off (e.g. --color and --no-color)

Agreed. It could be as simple as checking if there is a tty and whether or not we're inside a pipe.

AFAICT these options are new(er) and making them the default would likely be a backwards-incompatible change. I can see how it would be an uphill battle to convince the maintainers to introduce what appears to be a breaking change.

That said, a new alias that does trigger these new behaviors as defaults would be a sane compromise.

Just update ip to emulate ifconfig and netstat when called as such, like busybox does. Or all of those MTAs that ship with a sendmail command.

I'm one of those "grumpy old admins" they mention in the post, but I've switched to using ip for 5+ years now and have been happy. But, -brief -color is a new one on me, and I'm gonna add that to my toolbox.

$ ip -br -c a # ip -brief -color address

Option "-br" is unknown, try "ip -help".

Friggin' RHEL I guess I'll have to check back in a couple of years.

The "-brief" switch is not mentioned in the default manpage, at least on my Ubuntu 16.04 installation. Why? This should be mentioned prominently, as it's so useful.

"-brief" is also missing from the ip manpage on my 16.04 desktop, however it is listed in the output from "ip help". Looks like someone needs to update the man page...

Thanks! Just aliased that in my .zshrc. The route object doesn't seem to do colouring sadly.

You may want to consider installing cope, which colorizes the output of a number of common commands, including 'ip route'.

WHOA

That's crazy helpful. I'm aliasing it as well.

(FYI --color works too)

TLDRRTFM of the day

"read read"?

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