You know of course that you can perform pings from Perl with Net::Ping? The script does have to be setuid root, though, if you want to use ICMP packets (if this means nothing to you, then you do want to be using them).

If the IP addresses of the machine you are pinging are within a single network, you might be interested in a script I posted a while back: pinger - ping a range of hosts. There may be some ideas you can use.