Networking Basics: ip, ping, curl, wget

Relax. We'll talk through this in plain words — no textbook voice.

What you'll walk away with

Understand Networking Basics: ip, ping, curl, wget without any of the intimidation
Get hands-on practice trying out the commands yourself in the terminal
See how these commands actually come in handy on a real server or project

Let's think about it this way for a second

ip addr (or ip a) shows your machine's network interfaces (Wi-Fi, Ethernet) and IP addresses — basically, 'what name does this machine go by on the network.' ping <address> sends little packets to a target to check 'can you hear me?' — if you get a response back, you know the connection is working (you stop it with Ctrl+C; by default it keeps going until you stop it yourself). curl <url> downloads/prints a URL's content straight to the terminal — it's one of the most commonly used tools by developers for testing APIs and checking website responses. wget <url> is similar to curl, but it's more geared toward downloading files (and it shows a progress bar along the way).

Let's connect this to a real-world scenario

If you want to check 'is the server connected to the internet,' run ping google.com — if you get replies back, you know the connection is good. If you want to check whether an API endpoint is working, run curl https://api.example.com/status and look at the response directly in the terminal — curl is the go-to tool when you want a quick test from the terminal without needing a GUI tool like Postman. To download a software file to a server, just type wget https://example.com/file.tar.gz.

ip addr = view your network interfaces / IP address
ping = check whether a target can 'hear you' (stop with Ctrl+C)
curl = download/print URL content, wget = download a file (with a progress bar)

Let's try it together in the terminal

bash

ip addr
ping google.com          # Ctrl+C နဲ့ ရပ်
curl https://example.com
wget https://example.com/file.zip

You should see

Running ping google.com produces a continuous stream of reply lines starting with 'bytes from ...'; after stopping it with Ctrl+C, it shows a statistics summary.

5-minute try-it

Run ping google.com, watch about 5 replies come in, then stop it with Ctrl+C. Then run curl https://example.com and see if HTML content shows up.

A quick word of caution

Sending repeated requests to a website with wget/curl (say, inside a loop) can overload the target server — never do this to a site that isn't your own.

Easy traps

Not realizing you need to stop ping yourself and thinking the 'command is hanging' — you need to press Ctrl+C to stop it
Thinking curl's raw HTML output looks 'messy' — a browser renders it before showing it to you, while curl just shows the raw data

Now try it yourself

Run ping google.com, watch about 5 replies come in, then stop it with Ctrl+C. Then run curl https://example.com and see if HTML content shows up.

You'll know it worked when: Running ping google.com produces a continuous stream of reply lines starting with 'bytes from ...'; after stopping it with Ctrl+C, it shows a statistics summary.