At times, such as before configuring a VPN tunnel, I want to add an explicit route to the peer. It would be nice if iproute could be told to do this in one line. Thus, instead of first parsing the routing table and adding a new route, it should just add the new route according to the routing table: While doing this currently: ip r a $(ip r g 130.60.75.72 | head -1) yields the result I want, it would be nice to be able to say ip r a 130.60.75.72 via route Basically, this would cause iproute to instantiate a separate routing table entry with a longer netmask, using the default gateway if no other rule exists. It's a wishlist... :)