On 08.04.2011 19:23, Mike Oliver wrote:
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 08:08, Sergey Vinogradov<boo...@lazybytes.org> wrote:
Hi, hackers.
I have a question: why ipv4 netmask is displayed by ifconfig in hex format?
Isn't dot-decimal notation more human-readable? Will the attached patch
break something in the very bad way?
Who's using IPv4 anymore? ;-)
Long live IPv4! :)
Seriously though, if you give a small amount of time to learning the
hex -> binary translations then you would see how convenient it is to
use hex rather than decimal when representing what are ultimately
binary numbers.
See this blog entry by Jeff Doyle...
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/how-are-your-hexadecimal-skills
The article is great, but dot-decimal notation is de-facto standard for
stand-alone network mask representation. Like CIDR is standard for IP
blocks represenation. That's the reason I've started this thread.
And despite the greatness of the article you've mentioned, I think it's
a bad itea to hardcode its URL into ifconfig's output. You know, for
every single user reading it, and choosing the "way of hex" ;)
--
wbr,
Boo
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