Querying the NTP status interactively with commands

The commands for interactive queries consist of a keyword, followed by 0 to 4 arguments. You only have to specify as many characters of the keyword as needed to uniquely identify the command. The output generated by a command is normally written to the standard output; however, you can optionally have the output of individual commands piped to the file filename by appending >filename to the command.

The following distinction must be made between commands:

• commands that are executed internally by the ntpq program itself (ntpq-internal commands).

• commands that cause NTP requests to be sent to an NTP server.