Man page of IPTABLES - Netfilter
https://ipset.netfilter.org/iptables.man.htmlThe mask can be either an ipv4 network mask (for iptables) or a plain number, specifying the number of 1's at the left side of the network mask. Thus, an iptables mask of 24 is equivalent to 255.255.255.0 . A "!" argument before the address specification inverts the sense of the address. The flag --src is an alias for this option.