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While digging through the birds-nest of network initialisation in our embedded linux setup (Linux SDK on Leopardboard SBC) we've come across what seems like an odd and possibly non-functioning line in /etc/network/interfaces:

# Wired or wireless interfaces auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp pre-up /bin/grep -v -e "ip=[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+" /proc/cmdline > /dev/null

Now, the kernel cmdline in this system may contain the line "ip=192.168.2.1" or some other address, but this line specifically ignores it if it matches (grep -v = show non-matching lines only). Also, it's redirecting it to /dev/null, so it would seem futile either way.

Has anyone seen something like this or got any ideas what it could be doing / might be intended to do, other than nothing?

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From man interfaces:

 pre-up command Run command before bringing the interface up. If this command fails then ifup aborts, refraining from marking the interface as configured, prints an error message, and exits with status 0. This behavior may change in the future.

From there, I would guess that the command you quoted is basically a test, destined to abort the ifup and reconfiguring the interface, if there's already and ip=... line in cmdline. The redirection to /dev/null is applied to the pre-up error message, not the grep.

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