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There is a line in the output info of sudo ifconfig.

      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

What kind of word type UP is? A verb?
It means enhance ,lift,raise?
Why write it as UPPING BROADCAST such as RUNNING MULTICAST?
Is RUNNING MULTICAST a phrase to modify BROADCAST?

dirkt is so kind to explain it in detail,the person who downgrade me would apologize for the action ,it is hard to fully understand many manual for a non-native english speaker.
It is not a joke to ask such kind of issue for a non-native english speaker.

showkey
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1 Answers1

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All of these are flags; it's not a complete sentence. UP is actually a preposition, not a verb (not that it matters), in contrast to DOWN, and an interface is said to be up if it's enabled to transmit and receive network packets. By default, ifconfig only lists network interfaces that are up. You need to use ifconfig -a to also see interfaces that are down. (Or use the more modern ip instead of ipconfig in the first place).

You can also change the state of the interface from up to down, or vice versa, using ifconfig (or ip link).

In the same way, BROADCAST, MULTICAST and RUNNING are other flags that describe characteristics of the network interface (able to do broadcasts, able to do multicasts, etc.)

dirkt
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  • dirkt is so kind to explain it in detail,the person who downgrade me would apologize for the action ,it is hard to fully understand many manual for a non-native english speaker. – showkey Jan 30 '17 at 12:10