These questions are supposed to work as a proxy for experience. Everybody can google the answer to trivia, but if an applicant doesn't know the answer by heart that's an indication for lack of experience.
I still google things i know how to do that i don't use often because it's quicker to copy and paste than to try remember details that are vague in my memory. The example given is exactly one of those cases.
Even Jeff Atwood tweeted that he does this the other day.
Don't laugh at me. I didn't even state whether I support these questions. But if you don't know your way around basic shell gotchas or can't tell how many bytes are in a MAC address (or can at least conclude it by remembering working with them), you likely haven't worked enough on the command-line / haven't worked enough in networking. There's nothing funny about it. If you don't agree you're just a bitter cynic.
