The Linux traceroute utility identifies the path that is taken from a client node to a specified destination node and the time in milliseconds for each router identified in the path to respond to a request. By default, the traceroute utility uses a default maximum value of 30 hops; if the path between the client and destination requires more than 30 routers or hops, you can increase the maximum number of hops with the -h switch. Because traceroute requests depend on responses to ICMP requests, some hops on the route may drop requests in favor of higher-priority network traffic.

The following traceroute command was issued from an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance of Ubuntu Linux 14.04. The arguments -T -p 80 -n perform a TCP-based trace on port 80 and return IP addresses rather than hostnames. The Linux traceroute option to specify a TCP-based trace rather than relying on ICMP is useful because most Internet devices deprioritize ICMP-based trace requests. The Linux traceroute option to retrieve only IP addresses is useful when the hostnames that are returned are wrong or misleading: