Editing Traceroute (section)

== Usage ==
[[Image:Visual traceroute.png|thumb|right|350px|Router addresses can be superimposed upon maps of their physical locations. This example shows a request from New Zealand to an IP address in [[Massachusetts]] which takes a route that passes through Europe.]]

Most implementations include options to specify the number of queries to send per hop, time to wait for a response, the hop limit and port to use.  Invoking traceroute with no options displays the list of available options

For Linux, ''man traceroute'' presents more details, including the displayed error flags. 

For example:

<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
$ traceroute -w 3 -q 1 -m 16 example.com
traceroute to example.com (93.184.216.34), 16 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  192.x.x.x (192.x.x.x)  5.152 ms
 2  10.x.x.x (10.x.x.x)  12.767 ms
 3  172.x.x.x (172.x.x.x)  11.638 ms
 4  172.x.x.x (172.x.x.x)  13.193 ms
 5  xxx.x.x.x.cox.net (68.x.x.x)  20.624 ms
 6  xxx.xxx.xxx.edgecastcdn.net (192.x.x.x)  56.205 ms
 7  xxx.xxx.xxx.edgecastcdn.net (192.x.x.x)  24.573 ms
 8  *
 9  *
10  93.x.x.x (93.x.x.x)  22.810 ms
11  93.x.x.x (93.x.x.x)  20.235 ms
</syntaxhighlight>

In the example above, selected options are to wait for three seconds (instead of five), send out only one query to each hop (instead of three), limit the maximum number of hops to 16 before giving up (instead of 30), with ''example.com'' as the final host. On line 8 and 9 (TTLs 8 and 9) it shows asterisks where the router did not respond within the timeout.