[illumos-Developer] making -a default for ifconfig?

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On 30 May 2011 09:04, Andre van Eyssen <andre at purplecow.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 29 May 2011, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
>> I'd say the same of "ping -s" being the default. I (and no doubt many
>> others) often use ping as a quick way to simultaneously check if a host is
>> up, and what its IP address is. Knowing whether its alive or not is not
>> terribly useful, -s gives you that + more info.
> -1 to the ping idea - Solaris ping has had the same behaviour forever and
> I'm sure I'm not the only one with a "ping foo && blah" habit.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of scripts that depend on that behaviour from
Solaris ping.

The good news is for interactive usage you can set
MACHINE_THAT_GOES_PING in your environment and "-s" becomes the
default.  See:

  http://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd/cmd-inet/usr.sbin/ping/ping.c#499

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
UNIX Admin/Developer
http://blog.sysmgr.org