Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy at nobugconsulting.ro> writes: > On 06/07/2014 03:03 AM, lee wrote: >> Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy at nobugconsulting.ro> writes: >> [..] >> You're right, I overlooked the 'dev'. >> >> Why doesn't the error message simply say "syntax error" and perhaps even >> points out that "dev" might be missing? > Because the program "ip" is pretty cryptic, despite being way more > powerful than most people know The program is too powerful and cryptic to print reasonable error messages ... IIRC, I've been reading that route shall be replaced with ip, and I don't like that idea. Route is sufficiently confusing and works fine. >> There is no 'to' in the >> configuration file anywhere, and saying that "eth0" might be "a garbage" >> isn't helpful in any way. This isn't any better than failing silently >> or just printing "error". > Each line of the route-eth* file(s) is passed ad-literam to ip route > commands so all error messages that you see come from ip. Examine > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-routes for details. In your case, > you should test the content of route-eth* by using: ip route add > $EachLineOneByOne I checked if there is a 'to' in the file when I got that message, and there was none. >> I would like to make a bug report about this so that the useless error >> message may be changed. But what package should the report refer to? > You could file a RFE either against iproute which actually triggers the > messages you've seen or against initscripts (ifup-routes is provided by > it - you could ask for a better parser ). Thanks :) Improving ip so that it can print useful error messages seems to make more sense than involving a special parser for the particular purpose of these initscripts. -- Knowledge is volatile and fluid. Software is power.