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by cesarb
882 days ago
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That's a leftover from back when IPv6 was very new (yes these utilities are that old), and the networking utilities (ping, traceroute, etc) understood only IPv4. It's no longer necessary, all relevant networking utilities have since been upgraded to work with both IPv4 and IPv6; you can use just "ping" with a IPv6 address and it should work. |
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Not on BSD-derived operating systems (macOS included). You must use ping6 to ping an IPv6 address (including a hostname that only publishes AAAA records.)
From `man ping6` on macOS Sonoma:
> There have been many discussions on why we separate ping6 and ping(8). Some people argued that it would be more convenient to uniform the ping command for both IPv4 and IPv6.
> The following are an answer to the request:
> From a developer's point of view: since the underling raw sockets API is totally different between IPv4 and IPv6, we would end up having two types of code base. There would actually be less benefit to uniform the two commands into a single command from the developer's standpoint.
> From an operator's point of view: unlike ordinary network applications like remote login tools, we are usually aware of address family when using network management tools. We do not just want to know the reachability to the host, but want to know the reachability to the host via a particular network protocol such as IPv6. Thus, even if we had a unified ping(8) command for both IPv4 and IPv6, we would usually type a -6 or -4 option (or something like those) to specify the particular address family. This essentially means that we have two different commands.