Shell Programming and Scripting

After installation of FreeBSD there are post installation activities to be executed through a script. Since these activities are dependent upon a network being available, I want the script to detect whether a network connection is present or else halt the script. I currently have this test:

Code:

# ifconfig | grep 192.168.1
inet 192.168.1.14 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255

In other words, the script will check whether the IP address 192.168.1.x can be found. Is there a more robust way of checking whether an internet connection or network connection is available?

By querying only the next hop you just make sure there is a network connection, not a connection to the internet. For instance: if you are connected to your DSL-router, but the router provides no internet connection your test will be positive but your attempt to connect to an internet destination will fail.

The more reliable test will be to either ping the host you are going to connect to (if this fails it will not matter why it fails for your purpose) or ping some well-known host (for instance google.com) instead.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Thank you for your prompt reply and I will try that.