Finding out your external IP address on a linux machine that is command line only.

Recently i've been dabbling with VPN services on various computers in my house and I needed to verify if a particular machine was using the VPN IP or not (it's an Raspberry Pi running OpenElec)

first step was SSH'ing to the Pi and then to find out what my IP currently really is.

the easiest way is to use an external service via the command line browser or download tool. Since wget is available on most systems, we can use that.
To find your ip, use:

wget -qO- http://ipecho.net/plain ; echo