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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T21:25:31+00:00

I need to retrieve the default gateway on a Mac machine. I know that

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I need to retrieve the default gateway on a Mac machine. I know that in Linux route -n will give an output from which I can easily retrieve this information. However this is not working in Mac OSX(Snow Leopard).

I also tried netstat -nr | grep 'default', but I was hoping for a cleaner output like that produced by route -n in Linux/Unix. netstat -nr lists all the interfaces and the default gateway for them.

Any kind of suggestion or a hint in the right direction will be appreciated.

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can try with:

    route -n get default

    It is not the same as GNU/Linux’s route -n (or even ip route show) but is useful for checking the default route information.
    Also, you can check the route that packages will take to a particular host. E.g.

    route -n get www.yahoo.com

    The output would be similar to:

       route to: 98.137.149.56
destination: default
       mask: 128.0.0.0
    gateway: 5.5.0.1
  interface: tun0
      flags: <UP,GATEWAY,DONE,STATIC,PRCLONING>
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    rttvar  hopcount      mtu     expire
       0         0         0         0         0         0      1500         0

    IMHO netstat -nr is what you need. Even MacOSX’s Network utility app(*) uses the output of netstat to show routing information.
    Network utility screenshot displaying routing table information

    (*) You can start Network utility with open /Applications/Utilities/Network\ Utility.app

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