Renew the DHCP lease

Medium risk

What do risk levels mean?

Read-only: Inspects state without changing anything.
Low risk: Reversible with a routine follow-up command.
Medium risk: Changes state; undo path documented.
Destructive: Deletes or overwrites; confirmation required.

Releases the current DHCP lease and requests a new one, which briefly drops connectivity — the standard fix for a stale or self-assigned (169.254.x.x) address after switching networks.

networkdhcpipinterface

Parameters

interface

Network interface to renew (macOS/Linux only, for example en0 or eth0).

Commands

Inspect the current address before renewing

$ipconfig getifaddr en0

Restart DHCP on the interface to request a fresh lease

$sudo ipconfig set en0 DHCP

Verification

$nslookup example.com

The interface has a routable address again and name resolution succeeds.

Undo

Not undoable

The previous lease cannot be restored, and does not need to be — the interface simply holds whichever lease the DHCP server granted.

Pitfalls

Connectivity drops for a few seconds during renewal; do not run this over a remote session on the same interface, or you will disconnect yourself.
On Linux systems using NetworkManager, prefer "nmcli device reapply <interface>"; dhclient may not be installed or may conflict with it.
macOS interface names vary (en0 is typically Wi-Fi on laptops); list interfaces with "networksetup -listallhardwareports" first.