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If a programmer whom I know and respect in general asks me how she can do X, I tend to start with an answer about X.

When a name I've never seen before on a -users mailing list asks me how to do X -- and X is bizarre -- I assume we have the XY problem.

We have the XY problem because the Internet is full of newbies at any given point, and we've wasted enough attention-span having sixteen-part conversations about how to extract the IP address from ifconfig output* that we'd really like to know if we can skip all that and answer with "Use a dynamic DNS client, don't write your own."

*Don't. Use ip a

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Use awk.

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There are an infinite number of guides to awk, but mostly you need to know how it splits strings into fields and prints the ones you specify. How are you planning on handling machines with multiple IPs, by the way?

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Stop right there. Get a dynamic DNS client.



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