Was this to avoid having to parse the text output from ip a show?

Was this to avoid having to parse the text output from ip a show?

Yes, it is to get ip -j working. Works with routing tables too:

❯ l shell alpine ip -j route | jq '.[] | select(.dst == "default")'
{
  "dst": "default",
  "gateway": "192.168.5.2",
  "dev": "eth0",
  "protocol": "dhcp",
  "prefsrc": "192.168.5.15",
  "metric": 1002,
  "flags": [],
  "metrics": [
    {
      "mtu": 1500
    }
  ]
}

Seems more robust, and every modern Linux distro has iproute2 including the Alpine Cloud images published by upstream.

Why not, we add some other creature comforts like bash (at least the emulated version of it).

I'm still reaching for ifconfig :-)