Today I continued working on my lsaddr utility for listing IP addresses. Here’s a quick update:

  • there is now a repository on GitHub

  • I have a man page that I’m mostly pleased with; here’s the synopsis:

    lsaddr [ -46 ] [--include-loopback] [--include-ipv6-link-local] [ interface ... ]

  • I am checking that the supplied interfaces exist and reporting errors with error, which I discovered was the done thing by using ltrace on ls does-not-exist :-)
  • I tried to use lfind to determine if interfaces were listed as arguments, but wow what a mess that was1; I scrapped that to come back to it another day

In other news, I read this exciting post by Brendan Gregg on eBPF and tracing in the kernel. Apparently it will soon be possible to gather latency data from inside the kernel. I haven’t figured out if this could be interesting for IPC benchmarks.


  1. the closest C comes to having generics / parametric polymorphism is void *. With things like malloc, this is mostly fine. With algorithms like lfind and friends… well you’re going to have a bad time. Just look a this signature:

    void *lfind(const void *key, const void *base, size_t *nmemb, size_t size, int(*compar)(const void *, const void *))

    I find std::find unfriendly, but this is a whole other level. ↩