ranges is a command line program written in C that extracts ranges from various types of lists. By default it parses signed decimal integer lists, but given the right argument it can work with unsigned hexadecimal, octal and binary numbers, dates, IPv4, IPv6 and MAC addresses. The list input is given over the standard input, so by pipe, and is assumed to be sorted, but can have duplicates.
Note that you need make, gcc-11 and pandoc to install ranges from sources:
You can install ranges with:
make
sudo make installYou can uninstall it with:
sudo make uninstallOn a Debian-based distro you can also install ranges via a deb package with:
make deb-installIn this case removal is done with:
make deb-uninstallNote that I plan to package this for Debian and possibly other distros soon, then installation should become even easier.
ranges [-H|-o|-b|-d|-i|-I|-m] [-f] [-h] [FILE]
When no other range type is given, the program will extract ranges form a list of signed decimal numbers in the format DDD...D with D being a decimal digit. An example number would be 1234.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| -H, --hex | For unsigned hexadecimal numbers e.g. 0x12ab. |
| -o, --octal | For unsigned octal numbers e.g. 0o0127. |
| -b, --binary | For unsigned binary numbers e.g. 0b0110. |
| -d, --date | For dates e.g. 2022-10-25. |
| -i, --ipv4 | For IPv4 addresses e.g. 127.0.0.1. |
| -I, --ipv6 | For IPv6 addresses e.g. ::1. |
| -m, --mac | For MAC addresses e.g. 00:12:34:ab:cd:ef. |
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| FILE | Optional input file. Stdin is used by default, can't be a tty. |
| -s, --size | Output the range size as third column. |
| -f, --force | Ignore parsing errors like malformed IPv6 addresses. |
| -h, --help | Print the help message. |
| -v, --version | Print version, copyright and license information. |
For more information refer to the help message with -h/--help or the
manpage with
man ranges$> printf '1\n2\n2\n3\n6\n7\n8\n' | ranges
1 2
3 4
$>
$> printf '1.0.0.1\n1.0.0.2\n1.1.1.1\n' | ranges --ipv4
1.0.0.1 1.0.0.2
1.1.1.1 1.1.1.1
$>On Ubuntu and Debian the following command should install all those build dependencies:
sudo apt install -y build-essential gcc-11 pandoc valgrind lintianWhat all these are needed for is explained in the following sections.
ranges uses nothing more than the C standard library so to build the binary
you need make and gcc-11. Version 11 is required because we use all
security flags recommended by
https://airbus-seclab.github.io/c-compiler-security/gcc_compilation.html
, some of which are only available since that version. To build the binary
run:
makeOur extensive test suite is based on bats, which is however supplied as git
submodule so doesn't need to be installed, but initialized:
git submodule initAll tests are run with and without valgrind's memcheck tool. You can
run all tests with:
make testsNote that even though the tests are run in parallel, it might still take a moment to run through all of them.
You can build the manpage with pandoc using:
make docsTo pack the deb package use:
make debTo run lintian on the debian package run use:
make deb-testsIn case you wonder when this program might be useful, let me give you a short
example: I work in data center on a system consisting of a larger number of
servers. Their different IP addresses are configured statically and also
contained in the /etc/hosts of our management machine. Unfortunately, the way
we initially assigned the addresses to the different types of nodes (compute,
gpu, ...) turned out not to be very scalable, when we got a huge bunch of new
servers. Our subnet was a mess in terms of fragmentation and finding the
still free addresses manually would have been tedious. We wondered whether
there was any command line tool that could summarize the list of IP addresses
from the /etc/hosts into address ranges, so we could easily find the gaps.
While it didn't take more than a few minutes to program a small Python script
that would do just that, at least for IPv4 addresses, I was surprised that I
couldn't find any general command line tool for the job.
It is obviously more convenient to have a ready to use command line tool that supports different types of lists, instead of scripting a new one anytime some problem like the one described above comes up, ranges is written in C and therefore also much faster. A short runtime comparison with a Python script similar to my first one on a large IPv4 address list (10 million entries) gives the following results:
$> make perf-comparison
./scripts/perf-comparison.sh
ipranges.py: 29.188s
ranges -i: 0.836s
OK: ranges is more than 20 times faster than ipranges.py
$>This code is distributed under GPLv3 license.