Reading an IP address in a shell script requires many time and various Linux distributions stores IP address in different text files. So most of us end up writing shell pipes/scripts to get the information using ifconfig | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}' syntax. There is an alternative to ifconfig+shell pipe hack – ifdata command. It is a little know tool that can be used to check for the existence of a network interface and find out info about your interface such as IP, netmask, MTU and much more. No need to write shell pipes and fetch information via ifconfig or ip command. This command is designed to be easily used by a shell script.