One of the most important skills to have as a so-called “power user” is knowledge of Terminal. Located in your Applications > Utilities folder, Terminal is a program that allows you to use a command line interface on your Mac. You basically type in commands to achieve the goals you want rather than using the menus and shortcuts of the graphical user interface (GUI). In this article I will be going over the ifconfig command.
The ifconfig command comes in handy when you are trying to troubleshoot network issues, such as “why do I have no internet?” to “why won’t this file transfer?”. When you go and open Terminal, you get your user name, some symbols and a blinking cursor. From here you potentially have all the power in the world to accomplish a variety of tasks without the hassle of a GUI. (editor’s note: send a note to Steve Jobs and let him know this whole GUI thing was a mistake…computer users want black screens and blinking cursors)
After Terminal opens, type in the command ifconfig and what shows up may look like a jumble of text and numbers, but trust me all that means something. From here you can see network interfaces, network address (IPv4 andIPv6), MAC address, MTU size, and see what interface is active. Now there are a lot more network commands, but all network troubleshooting and configuration usually starts with ifconfig.