There are times when it is desirable to determine programmatically whether a an IP Address is valid or not. This little BASH code snippet does exactly that. The return code will be 0 if it is a valid IP address and 1 if not.
################################################################################
# Determine whether an arbitrary set of four octets of numeric data separated #
# by periods is a valid IP address. #
# Note: This code was taken from Linux Journal June 26, 2008 #
# http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/validating-ip-address-bash-script #
################################################################################
valid_ip()
{
local ip=$1
local
stat=1
# Check the IP address under test to see if it matches the extended REGEX
if [[ $ip =~ ^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$ ]]
then
# Record current default field separator
OIFS=$IFS
# Set default field separator to .
IFS='.'
# Create an array of the IP Address being tested
ip=($ip)
# Reset the field separator to the original saved above IFS=$OIFS
# Is each octet between 0 and 255?
[[ ${ip[0]} -le 255 && ${ip[1]} -le 255 && ${ip[2]} -le 255 && ${ip[3]} -le 255 ]]
# Set the return code.
stat=$?
fi
}