I'm attempting to determine the path MTU from my Mac to various sites, and can't find a built-in utility to accomplish this.
In Linux, I would use a utility like tracepath, but I"m wondering if there is some sort of equivalent available for OS X.
MacOS – Equivalent Utility to Linux’s Tracepath
macosNetworkterminalunix
Related Solutions
iTerm 2 claims to be able to do this.
Edit: I just downloaded it, and it seems to work well enough that I think I'll switch from iTerm 1:
I'm not sure what's going on with you and macports, but I just installed tmux using macports. it took about 30 seconds, and was completely painless.
FWIW, I've subsequently spent enough time with GNU screen that I basically just use it for everything at this point. iTerm is nice if you want a local, mouse-driven multiplexer, but almost everything I do is server-side at this point, and doing it all over one SSH connection is much better anyways.
Here are some possible answers, all using the 'open' command-line utility.
The -a option means "open the file argument with the named application":
open -a TextEdit file.txt
The -e option means "open the file argument with the TextEdit application":
open -e file.txt
The -t option means "open the file with the default application for editing text files, as determined via LaunchServices". By default, this will be /Applications/TextEdit.app; however, it's possible for this setting to get overridden:
open -t file.txt
Finally, any file that's of the "text" type will get opened by the application bound to the text type if you just say open file.txt. You can use the "file" command to reveal what the operating system thinks the file type is: file file.txt. So, for example, if you renamed "file.txt" to just "textfile" then open textfile would still open it in the default text-file editing application, as long as file textfile still thought that "textfile" was actually a text file.
A short 'help' file on open can be found by running
open --help
Or you can read the whole manual with
man open
Related Question
- Mac – Linux ‘Byobu’ equivelant for mac
- MacOS – How to find a changelog of core utility versions in OS X
- MacOS – Commercial command line utility for transcribing voice memos to text
- Disk Utility – Command Line Equivalent to Obtain UUID
- macOS – How to Install Linux Applications
- MacOS equivalent for /etc/environ
- macOS Command Line – Reference Books or Websites on How Mac OS Works
Best Answer
You can use the standard
pingthat the Mac OSX comes with to find pmtu.ping -D -s <size> <host>shoud do the trick. Please note, the size is just the ICMP datagram payload size. To see the IP MTU, you need to add 8 bytes of the ICMP header and 20 bytes of the IP header (so for example, to send 1500 Bytes long IP packet, you need to specify size as 1472). Please note,-Dis important here, as it sets the Dont-Fragment flag on.You can also use
ping -D -g <minsize> -G <maxsize> -h <sizeincr> <host>to run a ping sweep. This pings your host with packets starting fromminsizeup tomaxsizeinsizeincrincrements. Again, same rule applies to your sizes - these are just for ICMP payload (so you need to add 28 Bytes to the size specified here for the full IP MTU size).What you're looking for is an ICMP unreachable message back with a "Fragmentation needed but Don't Fragment flag on" sub-type back. The IP address of the sender of the above ICMP message is the host or router which has its MTU set to lower than the size of your packet, on the link which it would use to forward your packet further towards the destination.
Please note as well, that sometimes (badly misconfigured) firewalls or traffic filters will block all ICMP messages and in such case, you'll just see no response. To test which host dropped the packet, you could run traceroute to your destination and then repeatedly ping every hop on the way with '-D' and a size or a sweep to discover the local MTU of the link that hop is connected to. It will be the link between the last host you can ping and the first host you can't that will have a smaller MTU.
Again - this is all subject to routers handling ICMP, which they might not.
The PMTUD (Path MTU Discovery) protocol works in the same fashion. It uses TCP packets with DF flag on. The TCP sessions endpoints agree on their MSS (Maximum Segment Size, which is MTU less IP and TCP headers, 40B) - they choose the smaller of the MSS values advertised by each host in the TCP handshake. Then they send all traffic with DF flags on, and wait for the ICMP unreachable or a TCP ACK. The latter means the PMTU is sufficient, the former mean they need to drop MSS.
Hope that helps!