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I have been trying to ban an IP address in iptables that starts with 047, but it would change it to 039.

iptables -v -w -I INPUT 1 -s 047.75.162.122 -j DROP

But the IP address would be banned as 39.75.162.122!

Why do you think this is happening?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This is what is happening:

$ printf "%d\n" 047
39

047 in octal is 39 in decimal.

You just need to drop the leading 0.

At a guess, this is happening because something in iptables is splitting IPv4 addresses into 4 decimal numbers so it can convert the IP string representation to a long. But that's conjecture.

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  • 5
    This behaviour ultimately comes from the underlying stdlib strtol() function: "An octal constant consists of the prefix 0 optionally followed by a sequence of the digits 0 to 7 only".
    – Digital Trauma
    Mar 10, 2017 at 19:40
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    @DigitalTrauma+ or just using inet_addr aka inet_aton which requires the effect of strtol(,,0)
    – dave_thompson_085
    Mar 10, 2017 at 21:22
  • It's POSIX conformant: "All numbers supplied as parts in IPv4 dotted decimal notation may be decimal, octal, or hexadecimal, as specified in the ISO C standard (that is, a leading 0x or 0X implies hexadecimal; otherwise, a leading '0' implies octal; otherwise, the number is interpreted as decimal)."
    – hobbs
    Mar 11, 2017 at 17:12
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inet_aton also accepts a couple of other less usual forms (the manual actually even describes them):

octal:
020.0.1.22     ->  16.0.1.22
hexadecimal: 
0x10.0.1.22    ->  16.0.1.22
combination:
020.0.1.0x16   ->  16.0.1.22
bottom two bytes together (old Class B)
16.0.278       ->  16.0.1.22
bottom three bytes together (old Class A)
16.278         ->  16.0.1.22
all in one, hex
0x10000116     ->  16.0.1.22
all in one, decimal (completely unreadable)
268435734      ->  16.0.1.22
this should be simple
0020.0426      ->  ...

They're likely to work on web browsers too.

Prefixing octal numbers with a zero, and hexadecimal numbers with 0x is at least as old as the C language.

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