Trace the route to a host with `traceroute`
The classic forgotten-syntax command: `traceroute` shows every router between you and a destination plus the round-trip time of probes to each hop.
01Command
$ traceroute example.com02What it does
traceroute works by sending packets with an increasing TTL, so each successive router answers with a 'time exceeded' message and reveals itself. Where the latency suddenly jumps tells you whether slowness is local, at your ISP, or further upstream. `* * *` for a hop means it didn't reply — often just a router that drops probes, not necessarily an outage.
03Risk
04Undo
✓No undo needed — this command does not change persistent state.
05Sources
- traceroute(8) — print the route packets trace to network hostEvidence: Documents traceroute's default UDP probing, TTL increments, and output format with hop latency
Last verified: 2026-09-17 · Category: Network
06Related solutions
Show every TCP and UDP socket in listening state with the owning process name and PID — the modern replacement for netstat.
Send a HEAD request to any URL and print the status line, server, content type, caching, and redirect headers.
When a connection is slow or flaky, traceroute only shows a snapshot. mtr keeps pinging every hop and shows live loss and latency statistics per router along the path.