How to get default gateway in Mac OSX

Question

I need to retrieve the default gateway on a Mac machine  I know that in Linux route -n will give an output from which I can easily retrieve this information  However this is not working in Mac OSX Snow Leopard     I also tried netstat -nr   grep  default   but I was hoping for a cleaner output like that produced by route -n in Linux Unix  netstat -nr lists all the interfaces and the default gateway for them   Any kind of suggestion or a hint in the right direction will be appreciated

User · Answer

I would use something along these lines      netstat -rn   grep  default    awk   print  2

User · Answer

The grep utility is not needed  Awk can do it all       netstat -rn   awk   default   print  2         192 168 128 1   Note that if you have something like Parallels  or a VPN  or both  running  you may see two or more default routing entries - it will be true if you use the  grep  suggestion above  too       netstat -rn   awk   default   print  2         192 168 128 1       link 12   and      netstat -rn   awk   default   print  2                                      utun1       192 168 128 1       link 12   To set a variable   default  for further use  assuming only one entry for  default               default    netstat -rn inet   awk   default   print  2       I prefer          over back-ticks   In the case of multiple default routes use       netstat -rn   awk   default   if   index  6   en    gt  0   print  2           192 168 128 1   These examples tested in Mavericks Terminal app and are specific to OSX only  For example  other  nix versions frequently use  eth  for ethernet wireless connections  not  en   This is also only tested with ksh  Other shells may need a slightly different syntax

User · Answer

For getting the list of ip addresses associated  you can use netstat command  netstat -rn    This gives a long list of ip addresses and it is not easy to find the required field  The sample result is as following   Routing tables Internet  Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire default            192 168 195 1      UGSc           17        0     en2 127                127 0 0 1          UCS             0        0     lo0 127 0 0 1          127 0 0 1          UH              1   254107     lo0 169 254            link 7             UCS             0        0     en2 192 168 195        link 7             UCS             3        0     en2 192 168 195 1      0 27 22 67 35 ee   UHLWIi         22      397     en2   1193 192 168 195 5      127 0 0 1          UHS             0        0     lo0  More result is truncated          The ip address of gateway is in the first line  one with default at its first column   To display only the selected lines of result  we can use grep command along with netstat  netstat -rn   grep  default    This command filters and displays those lines of result having default  In this case  you can see result like following   default            192 168 195 1      UGSc           14        0     en2   If you are interested in finding only the ip address of gateway and nothing else you can further filter the result using awk  The awk command matches pattern in the input result and displays the output  This can be useful when you are using your result directly in some program or batch job   netstat -rn   grep  default    awk   print  2     The awk command tells to match and print the second column of the result in the text  The final result thus looks like this   192 168 195 1   In this case  netstat displays all result  grep only selects the line with  default  in it  and awk further matches the pattern to display the second column in the text   You can similarly use route -n get default command to get the required result  The full command is  route -n get default   grep  gateway    awk   print  2     These commands work well in linux as well as unix systems and MAC OS

User · Answer

You can try with  route -n get default  It is not the same as GNU Linux s route -n  or even ip route show  but is useful for checking the default route information  Also  you can check the route that packages will take to a particular host  E g  route -n get www yahoo com  The output would be similar to     route to  98 137 149 56 destination  default        mask  128 0 0 0     gateway  5 5 0 1   interface  tun0       flags   lt UP GATEWAY DONE STATIC PRCLONING gt   recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire        0         0         0         0         0         0      1500         0  IMHO netstat -nr is what you need  Even MacOSX s Network utility app    uses the output of netstat to show routing information   I hope this helps        You can start Network utility with open  Applications Utilities Network  Utility app

User · Answer

Using System Preferences   Step 1  Click the Apple icon  at the top left of the screen  and select System Preferences   Step 2  Click Network   Step 3  Select your network connection and then click Advanced   Step 4  Select the TCP IP tab and find your gateway IP address listed next to Router

[macos] How to get default gateway in Mac OSX

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