Cisco IOS Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Converting Different Mask Formats

Problem

You want to convert between the three different formats that Cisco routers use for presenting mask information: standard netmask, ACL wildcards, and CIDR bit number format.

Solution

The following Perl script converts from any of these formats—netmask, wildcard, or bit count—to any other. The usage syntax is mask-cvt {n|w|b} {n|w|b} {nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn|/bits}, where the first argument specifies what the input format is and the second argument specifies the output format. In both cases, “n” is for netmask format, “w” is for wildcard format, and “b” is for CIDR bit format (with or without the leading slash, as in /24).

For example:

$ mask-cvt.pl n w 255.255.248.0
0.0.7.255
$ mask-cvt.pl n b 255.255.248.0
/21
$ mask-cvt.pl w n 0.3.255.255
255.252.0.0
$ mask-cvt.pl w b 0.3.255.255
/14
$ mask-cvt.pl b n /21
255.255.248.0
$ mask-cvt.pl b w /21
0.0.7.255

The Perl code follows in Example 5-1.

Example 5-1. mask-cvt.pl

#!bin/perl # # mask-cvt.pl -- a script to convert between the various # methods of masking IP addresses # sub usage() { print "mask-cvt [nwb] [nwb] {nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn|bbb}\n"; print " where the first argument, [nwba], specifies the input \n"; print " format as one of netmask, wildcard or number of \n"; print " bits and the second argument, [nwb], specifies \n"; print " the output format\n"; exit(); } if($#ARGV != 2) { usage(); } # get the input format style $_ = @ARGV[0]; if(/[nN]/) { # incoming format netmask, what's the outgoing $_ = @ARGV[1]; ...