dhclient.leases(5)

dhclient.leases5

Dhcp client lease database

Overview

The Internet Software Consortium DHCP client keeps a persistent database of leases that it has acquired that are still valid. The database is a free-form ASCII file containing one valid declaration per lease. If more than one declaration appears for a given lease, the last one in the file is used. The file is written as a log, so this is not an unusual occurrence.

The lease file is named dhclient.leases.IFNAME, where IFNAME represents the network interface the DHCP client acquired the lease on. For example, if dhclient(8) is configured for the em0 network device, the lease file will be named dhclient.leases.em0.

The format of the lease declarations is described in dhclient.conf(5).

Files

/var/db/dhclient.leases.IFNAME

Current lease file.

Releases

75 releases since FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE; the text changed 38 times.

  1. 3.2–4.5
  2. 4.6–4.7
  3. 4.8–4.11
  4. 5.0
  5. 5.1–5.2.1
  6. 5.3–5.5
  7. 6.0–6.3
  8. 6.4
  9. 7.0
  10. 7.1
  11. 7.2
  12. 7.3
  13. 7.4
  14. 8.0
  15. 8.1
  16. 8.2
  17. 8.3
  18. 8.4
  19. 9.0
  20. 9.1
  21. 9.2
  22. 9.3
  23. 10.0
  24. 10.1
  25. 10.2
  26. 10.3
  27. 10.4
  28. 11.0
  29. 11.1
  30. 11.2
  31. 11.3
  32. 11.4
  33. 12.0
  34. 12.1
  35. 12.2
  36. 12.3
  37. 12.4
  38. 13.0–13.2
  39. 13.3–16.0

Authors

The dhclient(8) utility was written by Ted Lemon ⟨[email protected]⟩ under a contract with Vixie Labs.

The current implementation was reworked by Henning Brauer ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.