It is all very well to be collecting this information, but how do we actually get to see it? To view the collected accounting data and the configured accounting rules, we use our firewall configuration commands, asking them to list our rules. The packet and byte counters for each of our rules are listed in the output.
The iptables command behaves very similarly to the ipchains command. Again, we must use the -v when listing tour rules to see the accounting counters. To list our accounting data, we would use:
# iptables -L -v
Just as for the ipchains command, you can use the -x argument to show the output in expanded format with unit figures.