Geolocation Bash Function

Last Updated: 2019-08-27

This handy little Bash function comes by way of this Twitter thread, using the IP API from ipinfo.io. Although I had to do some tweaking to get it to work on MacOS, due to it using dig. The issue I had was that when I just gave the function an IP, dig wouldn’t return anything, and the function itself would give me information for my public IP. To get around this, I had to check the input first to see if it was a valid IP. For this I’m using another function valid_ip() with a regex found here to check first for a valid IPv4 or IPv6 IP.

Here is the resulting code, which I’ve put in my .bash_profile.

function valid_ip() {
  [[ $1 =~ ^([0-9]{1,2}|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\.([0-9]{1,2}|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\.([0-9]{1,2}|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\.([0-9]{1,2}|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])$ || $1 =~ ^(([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){7,7}[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,7}:|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,6}:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,5}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}){1,2}|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,4}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}){1,3}|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,3}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}){1,4}|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,2}(:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}){1,5}|[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:((:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}){1,6})|:((:[0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}){1,7}|:)|fe80:(:[0-9a-fA-F]{0,4}){0,4}%[0-9a-zA-Z]{1,}|::(ffff(:0{1,4}){0,1}:){0,1}((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1{0,1}[0-9]){0,1}[0-9])\.){3,3}(25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1{0,1}[0-9]){0,1}[0-9])|([0-9a-fA-F]{1,4}:){1,4}:((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1{0,1}[0-9]){0,1}[0-9])\.){3,3}(25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1{0,1}[0-9]){0,1}[0-9]))$ ]]
  return $?
}

function gii() {
  ip=$(valid_ip $1 && echo $1 || dig +short $1 | egrep "^[0-9]+" | head -1)
  curl -s http://ipinfo.io/${ip} | jq;
}

The script also uses the jq command that parses JSON. To get this, you can install it by running:

MacOS:

(Requires Homebrew)

$ brew install jq

Debian / Ubuntu

$ apt install jq

Fedora / CentOS / RedHat

$ yum install jq

Examples:

$ gii www.google.com
{
  "ip": "172.217.9.228",
  "hostname": "lga34s11-in-f4.1e100.net",
  "city": "",
  "region": "",
  "country": "US",
  "loc": "37.7510,-97.8220",
  "org": "AS15169 Google LLC"
}
$ gii 4.2.2.2
{
  "ip": "4.2.2.2",
  "hostname": "b.resolvers.Level3.net",
  "city": "",
  "region": "",
  "country": "US",
  "loc": "37.7510,-97.8220",
  "org": "AS3356 Level 3 Parent, LLC"
}