How To Find Your IP

When you want to know your external IP address (i.e. the address which identifies you on the Internet) the easiest way is to visit What's My IP. But sometimes you want to know your internal IP address as well. This internal address is what identifies your computer on your local network (i.e. the network of devices which are connected to your router). Below you can find out how to easily check your IP address on various operating systems.

On Windows

The quickest and easiest way to find your IP on a Windows PC is via the command prompt. To open command prompt, pretty the Windows key and 'R' simultaneously to open the "run dialog" and then type "cmd". It should look like this:

Alternatively you can click the start button (normally in the botto left corner of the screen) and type "cmd" (it should locate "cmd.exe").

Once you've opened the command promt you should see a black window with a prompt. Next type the command: ipconfig

There will be a lot of information displayed on the screen, but the information you're looking for is most likely under "IPv4 Address" either under the section for "Ethernet adapter" or "Wireless LAN adapter" (depending on whether you're connected via ethernet or WIFI).

On Mac/Linux

Finding your IP on Mac and Linux is pretty much the same process. First open a Terminal; on Mac this can be found in the Utilities section of your Application folder. On Linux it depends on which distro you're using, but you ought to already know how. Next use the following command: ifconfig | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1

This is the quickest way to to find your IP information and filter out what you want to know. You can execute ifconfig as well to get the full information. The above command does the following: gets the result of the command "ifconfig", search that result for all entries containing the text "inet ", and then search for all lines in that result which do not contain the text "127.0.0.1" (which is the loopback address).