I am currently working on setting up a wireless mesh network using babeld as the routing algorithm. The documentation is very sparse, and most of the configuration guides I've seen online are using the deprecated ifconfig command.

I could obviously just install ifconfig and run the commands as-is. But, if possible, I would prefer to not create an unnecessary dependency on ifconfig, and just use the built-in iproute2-based commands instead. So I have been converting ifconfig commands I'm coming across into their corresponding ip versions (e.g. ifconfig eth0 up --> ip link set eth0 up)

However, today I came across the following babeld configuration script:

ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc essid reseaulibre.ca ap 02:CA:FF:EE:BA:BE channel 9
ifconfig wlan0 up
avahi-autoipd wlan0
ifconfig wlan0:avahi netmask 255.255.255.255
babeld -D wlan0:avahi wlan0

... and I don't understand how to convert the following line into a corresponding ip command:

ifconfig wlan0:avahi netmask 255.255.255.255

What is an equivalent command using ip, that would work in the context of the above configuration script?