Traceroute: info utili

Man page: 

TRACEROUTE(8)        TRACEROUTE(8)

Traceroute - print the route packets take to network host

da wikipedia:

Traceroute works by increasing the "time to live" value of each successive batch of packets sent. The first three packets have a time-to-live (TTL) value of one (implying that they make a single hop). The next three packets have a TTL value of 2, and so on. When a packet passes through a host, normally the host decrements the TTL value by one, and forwards the packet to the next host. When a packet with a TTL of one reaches a host, the host discards the packet and sends an ICMP time exceeded (type 11) packet to the sender. The traceroute utility uses these returning packets to produce a list of hosts that the packets have traversed en route to the destination. The three timestamp values returned for each host along the path are the delay (aka latency) values typically in milliseconds (ms) for each packet in the batch. If a packet does not return within the expected timeout window, a star (asterisk) is traditionally printed. traceroute may not list the real hosts. It indicates that the first host is at one hop, the second host at two hops, etc. IP does not guarantee that all the packets take the same route.