If you are trying to find out what your public external IP address is, you typically go to a web site specifically for this purpose, such as ipchicken.com or whatsmyip.org. Thanks to cURL, you can easily do this from the command line too. To install cURL, run the following command:

• Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install curl
• openSUSE: sudo zypper install curl

To find out what public IP you are using, run this command:

curl ifconfig.me

A single line will be returned containing your public external IP address.