prips - print the IP addresses in a given range

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Overview

prips is a tool that can be used to print all of the IP address on a given range. It can enhance the usability of tools that are made to work on only one host at a time (e.g. whois).

Installation

At this time, prips has only been tested on Linux and *BSD systems. It ought to work on any POSIX-compatible system. If you port it to a new platform and feel like sending me a patch, please do so! I will be very grateful.

Use tar to extract the source code:

tar xvfz prips-1.2.2.tar.gz

Enter the prips directory and type make. That will create a binary call prips. Copy that wherever you like (e.g. /usr/local/bin).

Examples

Example 1 and 2

The following two examples illustrate the most basic use of prips. The first example prints all of the addresses between the start IP address (first argument) and end IP address (second argument). The second example uses CIDR notation to achieve the same result.

[dan@twig /]$ prips 192.168.0.0 192.168.0.255
192.168.0.0
192.168.0.1
...
192.168.0.255

Do the same with CIDR:

[dan@twig /]$ prips 192.168.0.0/24
192.168.0.0
192.168.0.1
...
192.168.0.255

Example 3

We can also use prips to go from an IP range to CIDR notation by using the -c option.

[dan@twig /]$ prips -c 192.168.0.0 192.168.0.15
192.168.0.0/28

Example 4

The -i option allows us to set the number by which each address is incremented. This example uses the -i option to print only the network addresses of each class C size network in the range 10.8/16.

[dan@twig /]$ prips -i 256 10.8.0.0/16
10.8.0.0
10.8.1.0
10.8.2.0
...
10.8.255.0

Example 5

The last example is a shell script that pings all of the hosts on a (small) network in parallel. A one or zero indicates whether the host can be pinged or not. The -e options is used in this example to exclude the network address and broadcast address (0 and 255 in the last octet). Note that this script only works on small networks because it uses a lot of processes. There is a race in that if the pings don't return fast enough, you may hit your process limit...

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$#" != 0 ]; then
    ping -c 1 "$1" >/dev/null
        echo "$1: $?"
else
    for i in $(prips -e ...0,255 207.94.169.0/24)
    do
        exec "$0" "$i" &
    done
fi

Contact

The prips tool is maintained by Peter Pentchev. It is developed in a GitLab repository. This documentation is hosted at Ringlet with a copy at ReadTheDocs.