in reply to A plethora of forks

Hi..

Wouldn't it be more sensible to use the native Net::Ping? Then you wouldn't have to deal with forking at all :)

Cheers

qw[marcus]

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Re: Re: A plethora of forks
by ginseng (Pilgrim) on Aug 31, 2001 at 22:34 UTC
    With Net::Ping, 1 is returned if the host is reachable and 0 if it is not. It doesn't actually ever return the ping time, so it's not useful for determining "how far away" the host is.

    Also, Net::Ping will happily block will it's trying to reach the target host, so even if we wanted only to know if the host is up, we'd still have to fork.

    You're right, though, about turning to CPAN first, and I agree. Unfortunately, I tried it and found that it wouldn't do what was needed.