Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Tracing IP routes

When an application requests a service through the Internet, the server may be at a distant location and connected via many of gateways or routers. The traceroute command displays the address of all intermediate gateways a packet visits before reaching its destination. traceroute information helps us to understand how many hops each packet takes to reach a destination. The number of intermediate gateways represents the effective distance between two nodes in a network, which may not be related to the physical distance. Travel time increases with each hop. It takes time for a router to receive, decipher, and transmit a packet.