Digital Mages - ifstat(1)

IFSTAT

Section: User Contributed Perl Documentation (1)
Updated: 2019-04-21
Index

NAME

ifstat - Network Monitoring Tool for Linux

VERSION

$Id: bin/ifstat, 0.2 2019/04/21 20:47:51 acorliss Exp $

USAGE

  ifstat [-d {dev1 dev2 ...}] [-i {interval}] [-nb] [-DhV]

DESCRIPTION

This is a very simple program that does nothing more than provide a vmstat/iostat type program to monitor throughput through various network devices.

REQUIRED ARGUMENTS

None. If no arguments are passed it will simply dump the current counter values for all available interfaces and exit.

OPTIONS

    -b  --bits      list data sizes in bits rather than bytes
    -d  --device    list of specific devices to monitor
    -D  --debug     print debugging statements
    -h  --help      usage statement (this text)
    -i  --interval  seconds between counter dumps
    -n  --no-sum    suppress ALL line when watching multiple
                    interfaces
    -V  --version   print the version

All options are optional. If -d is omitted it will monitor all interfaces found in /sys/class/net. If -i is omitted it will print the current counter values and exit, just as vmstat and iostat do.

DIAGNOSTICS

None.

EXIT STATUS

Returns a 1 if there are any errors either with the execution environment or requested devices. Returns a non-zero value if exiting by a signal. Otherwise, it returns 0.

CONFIGURATION

n/a

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

This program only works on Linux systems exposing interface statistics via the /proc/class/net subdirectories. This limits it to v2.6+ kernels at the moment.

This program also makes no attempt handle counter roll-overs. In the event that this program is running when a counter rolls over to zero it will print the same delta as the previous line but then start calculating the deltas as normal thereafter.

Finally, this program makes no attempt to handle ephemeral devices. In the event that network devices being monitored disappear it will simply spit out a lot of ugly Perl'ish warnings which will certainly screw up the formatted output. Furthermore, if you're monitoring all available interfaces it will not pick up new interfaces that appear after the program started.

AUTHOR

Arthur Corliss (corliss@digitalmages.com)

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This software is licensed under the same terms as Perl, itself. Please see http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.