Although nowadays a lot of emphasis is put in Desktop/GUI utilities, many desktop users use cli commands to get some piece of information quickly: for example to query about the kernel version, to find information about the hardware in their computers, etc.

There are those cli commands we use in our everyday without giving them a second thought:for years when we wanted to know information about our computer ip/network interface we have used the ifconfig command. But things change and if you try to run ifconfig in Debian Stretch from the console you will get this error message:command not found.

Indeed, ifconfig has been deprecated; if you want to display information bout the network configuration you can use now the ip command:

ip addres

But if you rather to keep use ifconfig you can still do it provided you install it:

apt-get install net-tools

The net-tools packages contains various utilities to work with the network: ifconfig, netstat, route, etc. Once installed you will be able to use ifconfig as usual 🙂