Wait, what? ifconfig is deprecated? Now I need to start typing ip on Linux , yet another variation from my BSD machines where ifconfig is definitely still in use, and Windows where I have to use ipconfig.
'ip' does a hell of a lot more than just list devices. It's really worth learning how to use it.
you also don't need root rights to use it for display - although ifconfig can be run as a regular user, it's not on the path by default so it usually won't show up.
ifconfig is on the PATH by default for FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and OpenSolaris... to me it was always rather irritating that wasn't the case in Linux when I needed to find out the IP address of a machine.
I really don't understand why there is a need to throw out a perfectly good tool to replace it with something that is completely different and requires re-learning, and re-writing of scripts that are already using ifconfig.
