Mastering EmacsUsing the commandline network utilities from Emacs
Unbeknownst to many, Emacs comes with a full suite of wrappers around the common GNU network utilities.
Most of the utilities are just simple wrappers around their command-line equivalents, but in full technicolor; but some — like the nslookup support — also adds full Emacs comint support.
Another useful feature is the built-in ffap support (it means find file at point) and it will try to determine if the point is — if used interactively with the net utils below — on a hostname or IP and default to that.
The net utils library were written with the GNU libraries in mind, so Windows users may find the support a bit lacking. But you can always download the Win32 ports.
Here’s a list of utilities Emacs supports; invoke with M-x. You may have to configure them to your liking, and you can do that by invoking M-x customize-group RET net-utils RET.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
ifconfig and ipconfig |
Runs ifconfig or ipconfig |
iwconfig |
Runs the iwconfig tool |
netstat |
Runs the netstat tool |
arp |
Runs the arp tool |
route |
Runs the route tool |
traceroute |
Runs the traceroute tool |
ping |
Runs ping, but on most systems it may run indefinitely; adjust ping-program-options. |
nslookup-host |
Runs nslookup in non-interactive mode. |
nslookup |
Runs nslookup in interactive mode in Emacs as an inferior process |
dns-lookup-host |
Look up the DNS information for an IP or host using host. |
run-dig and dig |
Invokes the dig in interactive mode as an inferior process |
ftp |
Very simple wrapper around the commandline tool ftp. You are probably better off with TRAMP for all but low-level system administration. |
smbclient and smbclient-list-shares |
Runs smbclient as an inferior process or list a hosts’ shares. |
finger |
Runs the finger tool |
whois and whois-reverse-lookup |
Runs the whois tool but tries to guess the correct WHOIS server. You may have to tweak whois-server-tld and whois-server-list or set whois-guess-server to nil |
Nifty! I’ll keep it in mind for the occasional “route”, “traceroute” and “ping”.
Cheers,
Ruben