Almost a year ago, I posted this article describing a simple, CLI-based way to trigger the Wake-on-LAN magic packet on your network to wake a sleeping machine. Trouble is, that script is showing its age, taking advantage of some deprecated utilities to perform its function. This updated script performs the same task using a more modern toolchain.

#!/bin/sh

# find the IP address in the output of `nslookup`
ip=`nslookup imac | tail -2 | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`

# find the MAC address in the output of `ip neigh`
mac=`ip neigh | grep -i -m1 $ip | awk '{print $5}'`

# send the magic packet
wol -h $ip $mac
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The ip utility replaces ifconfig, arp, and many other utilities in most current Linux distributions.