Five Quick Searches That Turn Firefox’s Address Bar into a Network Command Line

On Monday we covered how to ping any server from the Firefox address bar with a quick search bookmark. If your fingers Ctrl+L faster than they launch a terminal window, there are four more quick searches that can turn your address bar into a network command line. After the jump, download a bookmarks file of quick searches for whois, traceroute, email (via Gmail), and domain lookups as well as ping.

Once you’ve imported the bookmark file below, in Firefox’s address bar, just type the utility name and hand it a parameter (either domain name, email address, or IP address). Here are the five commands and their usage:

• whois example.com
• ping example.com
• lookup IP address or example.com
• traceroute example.com
• email tips@lifehacker.com (via Gmail)

Download these five quick searches in this bookmark file and save it to your computer. Then import them into Firefox’s bookmarks manager.

If you’ve never used Firefox’s quick search bookmarks before, click the image below for a quick demonstration (will pop up a window).

Here are 15 more handy Firefox Quick Searches, Adam’s methods for taking them a step further, and how to get this same functionality in Internet Explorer.

What other network utilities do you use on a regular? Can we add any to this collection? Tell us in the comments.