Hope this helps,
Rich

I would also try the Net::Ping module and use a defined timeout. Here is an example.

use strict;
use Net::Ping;

use constant TIMEOUT => 1;

my $mNetPing = Net::Ping->new('icmp',TIMEOUT);

foreach ('host1', 'host2', '172.20.41.152')
{
  print $_,($mNetPing->ping($_) ? ' is alive' : ' is not alive'),"\n";
}

$mNetPing->close();
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Word of caution, on top of caution icmp usually requires suid root. tcp is prefered as it has the lowest overhead but tcp echo may be turned off at target hosts as a normal security necessity.

see Re: Net::Ping just don't werk.

mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'

I tried using Net::Ping but it doesn't seem to be working. If I print out $p->ping($ipaddress) where $ipaddress is a valid ip address on our network, all I get are zeros. Is there something I am doing wrong? Jonathan Southwick Allegheny College jsouthwi@allegheny.edu

It's hard to tell if you're doing something wrong without seeing your code. Here's an example I just threw together that works. Note - this is on a windows 2000 box, so issues with being suid root aren't something I take into consideration.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::Ping;

my $p = Net::Ping->new('icmp', 1);
my $result = $p->ping('192.168.2.1');

print "Result is $result\n";
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If you're still having problems, post your code so we can figure out where things might be going wrong.

Rich

You might be able to get some mileage out of a script I wrote and uploaded to perlmonks a while back: pinger - ping a range of hosts.

g r i n d e r

/usr/sbin/ping host  [ timeout ]
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--xPhase

UPDATE: See rchiav's advice, as Net::Ping seems a better way of doing this.

Sounds like a job for fork(). Fork a stack of kids to do the pinging and waiting in parallel.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
$|++;

my @hosts = qw( www.perlmonks.com  www.perl.com  www.netscape.com );
my (@pids, $count);

for my $host(@hosts) {
   sleep 1; # this limits to 1 kid per second, not actually required
   $count++;
   my $pid = fork();
   push @pids , $pid;
   die "Fork failed\n" unless defined $pid;
   next if $pid;      # get parent to reiterate and fork more kids
   my $reply = `ping -n 1 $host`; # get kids pinging, single ping
   print "I am child $count, pinged $host\n$reply\n\n";
   exit;              # kill child
}

# wait for kids to finish, no zombies on us
my $kids;
do {
    $kids = waitpid(-1,&WNOHANG);
} until $kids == -1;

print "Spawned $count kids, waited on @pids\nAll done!";
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cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

While it's not a pure perl solution, fping may help immensely if you've got more than a couple of hosts to check for. It's a threaded ping util designed to check large number of hosts and report back. I used this for uptime monitoring under Big Brother, improved performance by a substantial amount.

-Ducky