Introduction to the IPinfo CLI

Not long ago, we announced the launch of the official IPinfo Command Line Interface (CLI). We’re thankful for all the support and comments you’ve sent our way about this new release. Many of you gave us some great feedback on platforms such as Twitter.

Plus, some tweets even inspired some of the subcommands available in our CLI:

To thank you for your support and to help all of our users use our new CLI to its full capacity, we’re releasing a new blog series highlighting several commands.

These guides are largely inspired by our users. So if you have additional questions, feel free to submit them on Twitter or email us. Here are some articles to watch for in the next few months:

• How to filter IPs
• Lookup IP or ASN details
• See the location of IPs on a map
• Summarize IPs sub-command
• Convert IP CIDR to IP ranges & vice versa

Put briefly, these how-to guides focus on some common use cases as well as tips for using these commands. Keep reading to see what to expect from each of these how-to guides.

Guide #1: How to filter IPs

The first guide focuses on two commands - grep and grepip. In the upcoming article, we’ll offer some common uses, simple scripts and ideas for better grep functions, and how to use grepip to simplify IP filtering.

In writing this guide, our engineer behind grepip has this to say about IP filtering:

From a developer perspective, grepip is often a better answer than raw grep because it filters more reliably and has options to ignore or include bogon IPs which would be almost impossible with just grep - Uman Shahzad, IPinfo

So stay tuned for our guide on IP filtering to learn how to clean up a list of IPs into usable datasets.

Guide #2: Lookup IP or ASN details

Another way to use IPinfo’s CLI is to look up IPs or ASN details. This guide shows users how to look up a single IP address via our CLI. Then users can apply similar scripts to also conduct bulk lookups.

This article will also address some questions you submitted. For instance, one of our users received an error with ASN details.

This user gave feedback on May 19, and the IPinfo team gave an answer on GitHub that same day. (Side note: one of the perks of this application is that we can offer better support while improving our CLI based on user feedback.)

In other words, your feedback is valuable for other users, and these are the kinds of problems we want to help you solve in this new blog series.

Guide #3: See the location of IPs on a map

One of our newest tools, Map IPs, plots details such as IP ranges or abusive IPs on a map. Check out some of these sample reports to test this feature. Amazon IP ranges and Abusive IPs. This information helps companies pinpoint customers, identify origins of abuse, or visualize your global presence.

You can also use commands in our CLI to view the same details. In the third guide, we show you how to use the map subcommand to visualize IP addresses faster than ever.

Guide #4: Summarize IPs

Another free tool that’s accessible through our CLI is Summarize IPs. In this guide, we briefly explain how to use this subcommand to more easily access information such as location, IP types and privacy statutes, top ASNs and companies they belong to, top countries, and cities.

Along with that, we’ll also address some of your questions about this CLI command. For instance, this is some feedback submitted by one of you about our Summarize IPs announcement on Product Hunt:

So in addition to some helpful scripts, the article on this CLI command will answer common questions you submitted.

Guide #5: Convert IP CIDR to IP ranges (and vice versa)

This guide focuses on these subcommands: cidr2range and range2cidr. To help developers convert their datasets from IP CIDR-based to IP Range-based and vice versa, we’ve compiled a walk-through of these subcommands.

For those of you who want to keep up with this blog series, follow us on Twitter! Again, we’ve really appreciated your support and feedback. Here are just a few more responses to the CLI announcement that made our day!

And this comment from another user:

Thanks for all the feedback on this recent release! Keep them coming. Let us know what other questions or commands you’d love to see featured in our new blog series. We love to hear your ideas!

Share your feedback or connect with our data experts!

IPinfo is a comprehensive IP address data and API provider with flexible pricing plans to meet your business needs. We handle billions of API requests per month, serving data like IP geolocation, VPN detection, ASN, and more.