The “traceroute” program contains a client interface to ICMP. Like the “ping” program, it may be used by a user to verify an end-to-end Internet Path is operational, but also provides information on each of the Intermediate Systems (i.e. IP routers) to be found along the IP Path from the sender to the receiver. Traceroute uses ICMP echo messages. These are addressed to the target IP address. The sender manipulates the TTL (hop count) value at the IP layer to force each hop in turn to return an error message.