Quickly Get a Router IP Address from the Command Line

Mar 23, 2012 - 8 Comments

Router IP Address

If you need to quickly retrieve the IP address of the router you are connected to or through, you can find this information immediately in the Terminal of Mac OS X.


To uncover the connected routers IP address, just type the following at the command line:

netstat -rn |grep default

Hit return to see the results.

The result will look something like this, showing the router IP directly after “default”:

default 192.168.1.1 UGSc 108 0 en0

netstat will work for both wired and wireless connections, the difference of which will be shown as the interface. These are typically en0 and en1, though the port interfaces will vary slightly with Macs that don’t include ethernet ports or Wi-Fi / AirPort wireless card, and for Macs with only one form of network connectivity it will almost always be en0, though it varies per machine and per hardware.

For users who don’t want to bother with the command line, the router IP can also be found in Network preferences, and from the Wi-Fi menu in OS X, both of which are accessible from the graphical user interface and won’t require turning to the Terminal.

Thanks to Hans and Jen for the tip for an alternate way to the gateway retrieval from command line and to find it from the Network system preference panel. For those interested, the same netstat command also works in Linux, so you can extend your OS X knowledge beyond the Mac if you find yourself in a similar situation with another unix machine.

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Posted by: William Pearson in Command Line, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

8 Comments

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  1. OctavioShaffer says:

    on google.com just now and I couldn’t see my WAN IP address in there. I don’t know what the first one 192.168.1.1 is.

    Tracing route to google.com [66.102.11.99]
    over a maximum of 30 hops:

  2. cirrus says:

    You can also try:
    route get default | grep gateway|awk ‘{print $2}’

  3. light says:

    is there any way I can tell which wireless network is being used?
    I have 2. I can see them both in airport utility
    and it looks like they use different IP address
    eg the wireless network with Internet uses ip starting with 195. etc..
    eg wirelessnetwork without Internet uses ip address starting with 10.0.0 etc…

    —–
    I ask as trying desperately to work put how to capture mb/data usage on the Internet wireless only
    —-
    I was using surplus monitor tool but it doesn’t differentiate between wireless network.

    I hope I explained myself clearly as not very technical at all
    but would love to monitory mb Internet usage as share broadband with upstairs.
    —-
    on 10.6x with MacBook pro timecapsule and iphone
    thankyou

  4. maddler says:

    sorry, apostrophe characters among {} was replaced

  5. maddler says:

    use:

    netstat -rn |grep default | awk {‘print $2’}

    this will print gateway IP only.

  6. Jason Bush says:

    Check out the MAN page for networksetup
    That should get you started.

  7. Andy says:

    Why not just finish off the command…

    `netstat -rn | grep default | awk {‘print$2’}`

  8. Nyah says:

    Any way to change it?

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