So i am an Engineer for a ISP. I have a need to validate Customer Routers are reachable before and after a maintenance by pinging them. The current program that I use doesn't thread to speed things up so it can take a long time to complete.

Here is the overview what i am trying to do.

Give the program a list of ip's to ping in a list\array.
Thread to create a process for each ping task.
Then when the ping task completes return the outcome (Latency or Unreachable) back to the original process and put it in to array
Then print the results.

I have never done any programming with threads or forking.

First off is threads the correct way to program this?

Second does someone know of a good tutorial or have a good example?

Thanks in advance