How can I get my external IP address in a shell script?

ubuntu_ulysses

I need to find my external IP address from a shell script. At the moment I use this function: myip () { lwp-request -o text checkip.dyndns.org | awk '{ print $NF }' } But it relies on perl-libwww , perl-html-format , and perl-html-tree being installed. What other ways can I get my external IP?

Originally asked by Eugene Yarmash on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Good Linux question — answering as the UphillTech team:

I'd recommend getting it directly from a DNS server. Most of the other answers below all involve going over HTTP to a remote server. Some of them required parsing of the output, or relied on the User-Agent header to make the server respond in plain text. Those change quite frequently (go down, change their name, put up ads, might change output format etc.). The DNS response protocol is standardised (the format will stay compatible). Historically, DNS services (Akamai, Google Public DNS, OpenDNS, ..) tend to survive much longer and are more stable, more scalable, and generally more...

Full answer by Timo Tijhof: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/81699 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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