Re: Default behaviour of 'ifconfig'

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

  Hello!

Ignatios Souvatzis <is%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 10:01:50AM +0100, Marc Balmer wrote:
>> A cursory check on the Unix systems I run, including some Linux boxen,
>> revealed that all of them but NetBSD have 'ifconfig', when called
>> without arguments, default to the behaviour of 'ifconfig -a', which
>> seems both natural and handy to me.
>
> Solaris ifconfig shows the usage help.

Im my opinion we shouldn't consider such notorious examples of usability
as Solaris, unless you give it as an example for what it shouldn't be like.

To show the usage help we support "?" flag consistently throughout the
whole userland. Well, some especially archaic tools don't utilise getopt(3),
but we can change it (except for "dd" and, perhaps, some other weird cases).

It would be much better, if we just changed "ifconfig" default behaviour to
just list interfaces than print lengthy cheat-sheep. I'd prefer to see
the active ones by default, it makes more sense from user point of view.
If there's real need to check inactive ones, I can append some flag
(e.g. "-a"). Though I don't insist on listing only active interfaces.



-- 
HE CE3OH...