According to netstat(1) for the -i option: "An asterisk (“*”) after an interface name indicates that the interface is down" If appears this feature was removed in base r261207: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r261207 | glebius | 2014-01-27 03:15:21 -0500 (Mon, 27 Jan 2014) | 4 lines Merged /head:r256510,256512,257376,257469,260052: Make 'netstat -i' use getifaddrs(3) instead of kvm(3). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please fix or update documentation.
This isn't trivial now when netstat went to libxo. If I restore the functionality as-is, which is quite trivial, then in JSON or XML output the interface name would be mangled. So, we need asterisk in txt output, but extra field in JSON/XML.
Fixed in head.
A commit references this bug: Author: glebius Date: Wed May 6 16:43:45 UTC 2015 New revision: 282559 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/282559 Log: Printing interface names: o Restore historical behaviour of appending '*' if interface is down, and we have enough space to print it (usually we don't). [1] o Do not truncate interface names when printing in encoded format. o Report interface flags into encoded format. PR: 199873 [1] Sponsored by: Nginx, Inc. Changes: head/usr.bin/netstat/if.c