How to get default gateway in Mac OSX

I need to retrieve the default gateway on a Mac machine. I know that in Linux route -n will give an output from which I can easily retrieve this information. However this is not working in Mac OSX(Snow Leopard).

I also tried netstat -nr | grep 'default', but I was hoping for a cleaner output like that produced by route -n in Linux/Unix. netstat -nr lists all the interfaces and the default gateway for them.

Any kind of suggestion or a hint in the right direction will be appreciated.

You can try with:

route -n get default

It is not the same as GNU/Linux's route -n (or even ip route show) but is useful for checking the default route information. Also, you can check the route that packages will take to a particular host. E.g.

route -n get www.yahoo.com

The output would be similar to:

   route to: 98.137.149.56
destination: default
       mask: 128.0.0.0
    gateway: 5.5.0.1
  interface: tun0
      flags: <UP,GATEWAY,DONE,STATIC,PRCLONING>
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire
       0         0         0         0         0         0      1500         0

IMHO netstat -nr is what you need. Even MacOSX's Network utility app(*) uses the output of netstat to show routing information.

I hope this helps :)

(*) You can start Network utility with open /Applications/Utilities/Network\ Utility.app

For getting the list of ip addresses associated, you can use netstat command

netstat -rn 

This gives a long list of ip addresses and it is not easy to find the required field. The sample result is as following:

Routing tables
Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire
default            192.168.195.1      UGSc           17        0     en2
127                127.0.0.1          UCS             0        0     lo0
127.0.0.1          127.0.0.1          UH              1   254107     lo0
169.254            link#7             UCS             0        0     en2
192.168.195        link#7             UCS             3        0     en2
192.168.195.1      0:27:22:67:35:ee   UHLWIi         22      397     en2   1193
192.168.195.5      127.0.0.1          UHS             0        0     lo0

More result is truncated.......

The ip address of gateway is in the first line; one with default at its first column.

To display only the selected lines of result, we can use grep command along with netstat

netstat -rn | grep 'default'

This command filters and displays those lines of result having default. In this case, you can see result like following:

default            192.168.195.1      UGSc           14        0     en2

If you are interested in finding only the ip address of gateway and nothing else you can further filter the result using awk. The awk command matches pattern in the input result and displays the output. This can be useful when you are using your result directly in some program or batch job.

netstat -rn | grep 'default' | awk '{print $2}'

The awk command tells to match and print the second column of the result in the text. The final result thus looks like this:

192.168.195.1

In this case, netstat displays all result, grep only selects the line with 'default' in it, and awk further matches the pattern to display the second column in the text.

You can similarly use route -n get default command to get the required result. The full command is

route -n get default | grep 'gateway' | awk '{print $2}'

These commands work well in linux as well as unix systems and MAC OS.

The grep utility is not needed. Awk can do it all:

    netstat -rn | awk '/default/ {print $2}'
      192.168.128.1

Note that if you have something like Parallels (or a VPN, or both) running, you may see two or more default routing entries - it will be true if you use the 'grep' suggestion above, too.

    netstat -rn | awk '/default/ {print $2}'
      192.168.128.1
      link#12

and

    netstat -rn | awk '/default/ {print $2}'                             
      utun1
      192.168.128.1
      link#12

To set a variable (_default) for further use (assuming only one entry for 'default') .....

    _default=$( netstat -rn inet | awk '/default/ {print $2}' ) # I prefer $( ... ) over back-ticks

In the case of multiple default routes use:

    netstat -rn | awk '/default/ {if ( index($6, "en") > 0 ){print $2} }'
      192.168.128.1

These examples tested in Mavericks Terminal.app and are specific to OSX only. For example, other *nix versions frequently use 'eth' for ethernet/wireless connections, not 'en'. This is also only tested with ksh. Other shells may need a slightly different syntax.