If the probe answers come from different gateways, the address of each responding system will be printed. The address can be followed by additional information when requested. Three probes (by default) are sent at each ttl setting and a line is printed showing the ttl, address of the gateway and round trip time of each probe. It start its probes with a ttl of one and increases this by one until it gets an ICMP 'port unreachable' (or TCP reset), which means we got to the 'host', or hit a max (which defaults to 30 hops).

Traceroute attempts to trace the route an IP packet would follow to some Internet host by launching probe packets with a small ttl (time to live) then listening for an ICMP 'time exceeded' reply from a gateway. The default probe datagram length is 40 bytes, but this may be increased by specifying a packet size (in bytes) after the destination hostname. The only mandatory parameter is the destination hostname or IP number. The traceroute command utilizes the IP protocol 'time to live' field and attempts to elicit an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each gateway along the path to some host. Tracking the route your packets follow (or finding a gateway that's discarding your packets) can be difficult. The Internet is a large and complex aggregation of network hardware, connected together by gateways.

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