Install ipcalc with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• ipcalc

Project history

The original jodies.de page describes ipcalc as a tool that takes an IP address and netmask, calculates the broadcast, network, Cisco wildcard mask, and host range, and presents subnetting results in binary form as a teaching aid. The page also says the tool works at the shell prompt and was not originally intended for creating HTML.

The source header on the CGI wrapper carries copyright years 2000-2021, while the archive lists releases from 0.34 in 2001 through 0.41 in 2006. The GitHub repository describes itself as the IPv6-capable continuation of the subnet calculator from jodies.de.

Adoption history

ipcalc has broad package-manager reach for such a small script: the supplied metadata lists Alpine, Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, MacPorts, Nix, Arch, Scoop, Ubuntu, and openSUSE packaging. The original site also calls out Debian installation directly.

That broad distribution reflects the utility's shape: subnet math is universal in operations work, and a dependency-light Perl script is easy for distributions to carry.

How it is used

Users pass an address and mask, optionally with a second mask for subnet or supernet design. ipcalc prints network, broadcast, host minimum and maximum, host count, Cisco wildcard masks, class/private-network notes, and binary layouts.

The GitHub continuation adds IPv6 examples, including prefix calculation for IPv6 addresses, while preserving the familiar command-line output style of the original IPv4 calculator.

Why package nerds care

ipcalc is a canonical tiny admin package: old, scriptable, easy to package, and still useful because IP addressing math does not go out of fashion. Its value is less in novelty than in being available everywhere when a human needs to sanity-check a CIDR block.

It also shows the preservation path of many Unix tools: an original personal web page, tarball archives, distro packages, and a GitHub continuation that adds IPv6 support while keeping the old interface recognizable.

Timeline

• 2000: Source copyright begins for Krischan Jodies' ipcalc code.
• 2001-09-13: The archive lists the unpacked ipcalc-0.34 directory.
• 2005-07-07: Version 0.35.2 appears on the original page and archive.
• 2006-07-27: Security information was published for the CGI script.
• 2006-07-27: Archive entries include ipcalc 0.39, 0.40, and 0.41, with 0.41 adding network-range deaggregation.
• 2021-11-03: The GitHub continuation published release 0.51.
• 2021: The CGI wrapper copyright range extends through 2021.

Related projects

• Related tools include distro-specific ipcalc variants, web subnet calculators, Cisco ACL wildcard-mask calculators, and broader network calculators such as sipcalc.
• The GitHub repository is explicitly a continuation of the original jodies.de calculator, not an unrelated rewrite under the same name.

Sources

• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ipcalc
• https://github.com/kjokjo/ipcalc
• https://github.com/kjokjo/ipcalc/blob/master/ipcalc.cgi
• https://github.com/kjokjo/ipcalc/releases/tag/0.51
• https://jodies.de/ipcalc
• https://jodies.de/ipcalc-archive/
• https://jodies.de/ipcalc-security.html