Hey all,

I need to be able to determine my WAN ip address (dynamic) via a command line cron job. Does anyone have any recommendations?

See; man ifconfig

it's probably ifconfig ppp0 but just write down ifconfig and it will show you all interfaces

ifconfig gives me great information about my LAN but not my WAN. I am behind a router that I have no access to (This is an ISP managed router). I can only see the gateway IP.

Here's what I came up with....

I use curl to query whatsmyipaddress.com and then grep out whois. It works ok...

If anyone has a better idea please let me know.

try tracepath

for example

tracepath -n google.com

in my case i telnet my router from my linux box query for the ip and put it in a file in my linux box.

Tracepath works pretty good. The nice thing is in it's output it's the second node listed and has a 1: next to it.

Another way of determening your external ip from the commandline is using dig:

dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

this gives your public IP address

2 members found this post helpful.

Did we really need to resurrect a 9 year old thread for that?

Why does that matter? The 'dig' line from JHServices is the only one that works cleanly and returns nothing but the public ip address. It helped me.

This is a topic as old as the internet itself. It has been solved literally hundreds of different ways, almost all of which can be found with a 5 second search on ANY search engine or this forum or any other Linux forum.

Throwing out a suggestion in an active discussion is one thing, but resurrecting a decade-old thread to provide yet another solution to something that has been solved a hundred times before is just a waste of time and bandwidth.

I'm glad it solved your problem, but if that post wasn't here, you would have found an equally useful solution in the very next link on whatever search brought you here (the other link probably would have been the first anyway, if this thread hadn't been resurrected).

And since it is now timestamped as newer and likely to be referenced - here is a simple easy-to-remember solution:

I don't know, I think people get too concerned about thread dates sometimes, I hardly look at them myself, but obviously old threads can still be found since the guy managed to find (and answer) this one at the ripe old age of 9. Now it at least has a decent answer, so great. I looked at a few other pages before this one, and I didn't find anything as easy as the dig line. The waste of time and bandwidth stuff is a side issue that seems pretty negligible to me (aren't we wasting time and bandwidth even talking about it? )