How to find the default gateway on Linux

Last updated on July 18, 2020 by Dan Nanni

In TCP/IP networking, a default gateway provides a default route for a host to use in order to send traffic to remote networks. Here "default" implies that a host will always rely on this gateway to send traffic to unless it knows how to route the traffic.

To find out what is the default gateway used on Linux, you can refer to a local routing table.

The ip command shows a local routing table.

$ ip route show
default via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0  proto static 
169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0  scope link  metric 1000 
172.16.199.0/24 dev vmnet1  proto kernel  scope link  src 172.16.199.1 
192.168.1.0/24 dev wlan0  proto kernel  scope link  src 192.168.1.4  metric 9 
192.168.233.0/24 dev vmnet8  proto kernel  scope link  src 192.168.233.1 

In the routing table, the row starting with "default via" shows information about the default route configured on your Linux system. The information includes the IP address of the default gateway, and the network interface reachable to this gateway.

In this example, 192.168.1.1 is the default gateway, and it is reachable via wlan0 network interface.

If you are writing a shell script where you need to obtain the IP address of the default gateway programmatically, the following command can be useful. It will print out the IP address of the default gateway.

$ ip route show | grep 'default' | awk '{print $3}'
192.168.1.1

Thus in your script, you can easily store the IP address of the default gateway to a variable as follows.

#!/bin/sh

default_gateway_ip=`ip route show | grep 'default' | awk '{print $3}'`

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