route is a command used to view and manipulate the TCP/IP routing table

Routing table

In computer networking a routing table, or Routing Information Base , is a data table stored in a router or a networked computer that lists the routes to particular network destinations, and in some cases, metrics associated with those routes. The routing table contains information about the...

 in both Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 and Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 operating systems

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. Manual manipulation of the routing table is characteristic of static routing

Static routing

Static routing is a data communication concept describing one way of configuring path selection of routers in computer networks. It is the type of routing characterized by the absence of communication between routers regarding the current topology of the network. This is achieved by manually adding...

.

In Linux distributions based on 2.2.x Linux kernel

Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....

s, the ifconfig

Ifconfig

ifconfig is a system administration utility in Unix-like operating systems to configure, control, and query TCP/IP network interface parameters from a command line interface or in system configuration scripts...

and route commands operated together to connect a computer to a network, and to define routes between networks. Distributions based on later kernels have deprecated ifconfig and route, replacing them with iproute2

Iproute2

iproute2 is a collection of utilities for controllingTCP and UDP IP networking and traffic control in Linux, in both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. It is currently maintained by Stephen Hemminger...

, which adds functions such as policy routing and traffic shaping

Traffic shaping

Traffic shaping is the control of computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds of packets that meet certain criteria...

.

External links

• route(8) - on Ubuntu Manpage Repository
• route - on a technet.microsoft.com