ipconfig on Mac: No /all, and waitall Blocks for 90 Seconds

On the Mac mini that runs this business, ipconfig /all prints a usage message and exits 1. So does ipconfig on its own. Run with nothing after it, ipconfig waitall sat for 1 minute 30.15 seconds on a working Wi-Fi connection and then exited 0, as if it had succeeded. ipconfig getifaddr lo0 printed nothing and exited 1, though lo0 has had 127.0.0.1 on it all along.

So yes, ipconfig works on a Mac. It just isn't the Windows command. The macOS one is a small client for the IPConfiguration agent inside configd, and its man page says it "should only be used in a test and debug context." "ipconfig mac" got 205 Google autocomplete completions in our own collection today, led by "does ipconfig work on mac", "what is ipconfig on mac" and "ipconfig mac default gateway". Below: what each subcommand printed on macOS 26.4.1, where the exit codes and the man page disagree, why the Wi-Fi name shows as <redacted>, and the Mac command for each Windows switch.

What ipconfig prints on a Mac

/usr/sbin/ipconfig ships with macOS and runs without sudo for everything that reads. Give it no command, a Windows switch, -a or help and you get the same two lines on stderr and exit 1:

$ ipconfig /all
usage: /usr/sbin/ipconfig <command> <args>
where <command> is one of waitall, getifaddr, ifcount, getoption, getiflist, getsummary, getpacket, getv6packet, getra, getdhcpduid, getdhcpiaid, set, setverbose
$ echo $?
1

The machine is on Wi-Fi, which is en1 on a Mac mini (en0 is the Ethernet port; ifconfig on Mac has the full interface list). These are the read commands that answered:

Command	Output on this Mac	Exit
ipconfig getifaddr en1	192.168.20.34	0
ipconfig getoption en1 router	192.168.20.1	0
ipconfig getoption en1 subnet_mask	255.255.254.0	0
ipconfig getoption en1 domain_name_server	168.126.63.1 (the first of two)	0
ipconfig getoption en1 lease_time	7200	0
ipconfig ifcount	6	0
ipconfig getiflist	en0 en5 en6 en7 bridge0 en1	0
ipconfig getpacket en1	29 lines: the DHCP ACK, 10 options	0
ipconfig getsummary en1	81 lines of IPv4, IPv6 and Wi-Fi state	0

getoption takes DHCP option numbers as well as names: 3 printed the router, 6 the DNS server, 51 the lease time. It also accepts an empty interface name. ipconfig getoption "" router printed 192.168.20.1 and exited 0, which saves you from knowing whether you're on en0 or en1. The man page doesn't mention that; it's in the usage string in the source, <interface name | "">. For the default gateway the man page does tell you one thing worth knowing: options with several values print only the first. The DHCP packet carried two DNS servers and getoption showed one.

getpacket shows more than you might want to paste into a forum post. Besides the address, mask and router, the ACK from our router carried an opaque vendor option 224 holding a 16-character string that looks like the router's serial number. I'm not printing it here, and the chaddr field is the Mac's Wi-Fi MAC address. Check both before sharing the output.

Exit 1 with nothing on stderr

getifaddr fails silently. On this machine it printed nothing and exited 1 for en0 (no cable), en9 (doesn't exist), utun0 (a VPN tunnel), lo0 and an empty name. The loopback case surprises people. ifconfig lo0 shows inet 127.0.0.1, but ipconfig only knows interfaces that IPConfiguration manages, which is why a Super User question asks why getifaddr ppp0 fails on a VPN link. ipconfig getiflist listed 6 interfaces where ifconfig -l listed 24.

The source shows why there's no message. In S_if_addr in client.c, a lookup that comes back without success just returns 1. getoption does the same for an interface with no lease (en0, bridge0, lo0) and for an option the server didn't send, such as domain_name on our network. For a script, that's workable: test the exit code, not the output.

#!/bin/sh
# Print the IPv4 address of whichever interface carries the default route.
ifc=$(route -n get default 2>/dev/null | awk '/interface:/ {print $2}')
[ -n "$ifc" ] || { echo "no default route" >&2; exit 1; }
ipconfig getifaddr "$ifc" || { echo "$ifc has no address from IPConfiguration" >&2; exit 1; }

That printed 192.168.20.34 here. If the default route goes through a VPN tunnel, the second step fails on purpose, since getifaddr doesn't know tunnels; the route command on Mac covers reading the routing table directly.

Two places where the man page and the binary disagree. For getpacket it says the command "outputs nothing if DHCP/BOOTP is not active on the interface". On en0 it printed ipconfig_get_packet(en0) failed: not found to stderr and exited 1. getv6packet, getra and getdhcpiaid did the same on en1, which had no IPv6 address. And getiflist, which appears in the usage line, isn't in the man page at all.

waitall blocks for 90 seconds and exits 0

ipconfig waitall is documented as blocking "until all network services have completed configuring, or have timed out". On a Mac that had been online for hours it still blocked for the full 90 seconds. The client source explains it:

• It waits for a dynamic store key, Plugin:IPConfiguration, to exist. scutil reported No such key for it here, so the wait runs to the timer.
• The default timer is 90 seconds and the cap is 120. When it fires, the handler calls exit(0). When the key appears, a different handler also calls exit(0). Success and timeout look the same to your script.
• The optional argument is parsed with strtoul. ipconfig waitall 3 returned in 3.14 seconds. waitall 0 and waitall abc both set a zero timer, which disarms it instead of firing at once; both were still running after 15 seconds when I killed them.

If an old login script or LaunchAgent calls ipconfig waitall, that's a guaranteed 90 seconds on every run, on this macOS version at least. To wait for the network, poll something you can check, like ipconfig getifaddr en1 succeeding or route -n get default naming a gateway, with your own limit.

Why getsummary says <redacted>

ipconfig getsummary en1 is the closest thing to ipconfig /all: lease start and expiry (20:27:41 to 22:27:41, matching the 7200-second lease), the router, whether the router's ARP was verified, the IPv6 state, and the security mode (WPA2_PSK). The Wi-Fi network name isn't there:

  BSSID : <redacted>
  ...
  NetworkID : <redacted>
  SSID : <redacted>

That's a default, not a permission error. In ipconfigd.c, should_hide_wifi_info() hides the SSID and BSSID unless the hide preference was set explicitly, the machine is an Apple-internal build, or the agent's verbose flag is on. Verbose is what ipconfig setverbose 1 turns on, and without root it printed failed to set verbose and exited 1. I didn't run it with sudo, so I haven't confirmed that the names come back on this build. The command table also has a hidden setHideWiFiInfo command that the usage line doesn't list. The source is tag bootp-534.120.2; I haven't confirmed that it's the exact build in macOS 26.4.1.

The Windows switches, one by one

The Windows ipconfig reference lists /all, /release, /renew, /flushdns, /displaydns and a few more. On a Mac:

• Plain ipconfig (your IP): ipconfig getifaddr en1, or scutil --nwi, which printed en1 : ... address : 192.168.20.34 and needs no interface name.
• /all: ipconfig getsummary en1, or networksetup -getinfo Wi-Fi, which printed the IP, mask, router and Wi-Fi MAC in 9 lines. The service name must match exactly: "Wi-Fi " with a trailing space printed Wi-Fi is not a recognized network service and exited 4.
• Default gateway: ipconfig getoption "" router, or route -n get default. netstat on Mac shows the whole table with netstat -rn.
• /release and /renew: sudo ipconfig set en1 DHCP drops and re-requests the lease. Without sudo, even on a nonexistent interface, it printed ipconfig_set en9 DHCP failed: permission denied. I didn't run it on en1: this Mac is administered over that Wi-Fi link, and a renew that goes wrong ends the session.
• /flushdns: sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder, the command both the asker and an answer use in the most-viewed Apple Stack Exchange question with ipconfig in its title (39,735 views). Not run here.
• /displaydns: that thread is asking for exactly this, and it has no accepted answer. The answers offer workarounds: sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder to dump the cache state to the log, or streaming mDNSResponder's log with private data turned on. For looking names up, see nslookup on Mac.

A Stack Exchange API search for "ipconfig" in titles found only 3 questions on Apple Stack Exchange and 2 Mac-tagged ones among 99 on Super User, so I've cited them individually rather than counting themes.

FAQ

Does ipconfig work on a Mac?

Yes, but it's a different program from the Windows command. macOS ships /usr/sbin/ipconfig, which talks to the IPConfiguration agent and takes subcommands such as getifaddr, getoption, getpacket and getsummary. Windows switches like ipconfig /all print a usage message and exit 1. To see your IP address, run ipconfig getifaddr en0 on a laptop or ipconfig getifaddr en1 on a Mac mini or iMac on Wi-Fi.

How do I find my default gateway on a Mac?

Run ipconfig getoption "" router. The empty string means any interface, so you don't need to know whether you're on en0 or en1, and it prints only the router address. route -n get default also shows the gateway along with the interface it uses. Both run without sudo.

What is the Mac equivalent of ipconfig /release and /renew?

sudo ipconfig set en0 DHCP, using the interface name of your connection (en1 for Wi-Fi on a Mac mini). It removes the current IPv4 configuration on that interface and starts DHCP again. It needs sudo; without it the command prints permission denied and exits 1. Don't run it over a remote session on the same interface, because the connection drops while the lease is re-requested.

Method: every command ran on 2026-10-06 between 21:00 and 21:30 KST on a Mac mini M4 (Mac16,10, macOS 26.4.1 build 25E253) as a normal user without sudo, over Wi-Fi. I didn't run setverbose, set or the DNS flush with sudo, so the SSID reveal and the renew are from source and documentation, not tested. Timings come from the shell's time and /usr/bin/time; the waitall 0 and abc runs were killed after 15 seconds. Source references are to Apple's bootp-534.120.2 tag on GitHub, read on the same day. The router's serial-like option and the Wi-Fi MAC are withheld. The Q&A counts are Stack Exchange API title searches for "ipconfig" on Apple Stack Exchange and Super User, and the 205 autocomplete count is from our own Google suggest collection on the same day.