[ltp] OT: how to time a ping command?

[Eben King]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Marius Gedminas wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 08:49:51PM -0400, Eben King wrote:
> > On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, André Wyrwa wrote:
> > > Funny, that's exactly what i'm looking for, but my ping.1 doesn't
> > > include this and neither does my ping.
> > > Can you post your --version output please? Mine is from GNU inetutils
> > > 1.4.2 .
> 
> Ping in Debian woody does not have a timeout option (-w) either.  Ping
> in sarge does.
> 
> > I did something much faster (which I can't recall verbatim).  It would do 
> > something like
> > 
> > ping -c 1 somehost > /dev/null &
> > ping_pid=$!
> > { sleep 1 ; kill $ping_pid ; } &
> > sleep_pid=$!
> > wait $ping_pid
> > kill -0 $sleep_pid && # internet connection is up
> > kill $sleep_pid
> > 
> > (At least that's how I THINK I did it.)  Net effect was that you would
> > only wait for the timeout if the ping wasn't returned.  Normally there
> > would just be a ping then life would go on.
> 
> Eek.

Well, "ping -c 1 -w 1 somehost" would've replaced most of that.

> I suggest fping.  It has sane timeouts (and is present in Debian woody).
> 
> Description: sends ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts
>  fping is a ping like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol
>  (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is responding.  fping
>  differs from ping in that you can specify any number of targets on the command
>  line, or specify a file containing the lists of targets to ping.  Instead of
>  sending to one target until it times out or replies, fping will send out a
>  ping packet and move on to the next target in a round-robin fashion.

So "fping -c 1 foo bar baz" is roughly equivalent to

for host in foo bar baz ; do
  ping -c 1 -w small_number $host
done

?

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