ifconfig command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

ifconfig: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: ifconfig: command not found

Solutions to ifconfig: command not found

How To Fix ifconfig: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu ifconfig is provided by net-tools package.

net-tools is:

This package includes the important tools for controlling the network subsystem of the Linux kernel. This includes arp, ifconfig, netstat, rarp, nameif and route. Additionally, this package contains utilities relating to particular network hardware types (plipconfig, slattach, mii-tool) and advanced aspects of IP configuration (iptunnel, ipmaddr).

In the upstream package ‘hostname’ and friends are included. Those are not installed by this package, since there is a special “hostname*.deb”.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install net-tools

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install net-tools.

sudo apt -y install net-tools

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install net-tools

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix ifconfig command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.