What operating system are you running this code on? The module says it is still in alpha stage on CPAN, and for Windows systems, it was only tested on 98. I ran the following on Windows 2000, using ActiveState 5.6.1 build 632:

#!C:\perl\bin\perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Net::Ping::External qw(ping);

print ping(host=>"yahoo.com"), " | ", ping(host=>"wayfakehostname.com"
+);
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And received the following output:

C:\Documents and Settings\marc>perl test.pl
0 | 0
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On my system ping() is returning 0 for both valid and invalid hostnames (unless it didn't correctly perform the ping, I haven't checked the internals yet), which is why nothing is printing out when I run your code, either. Try playing around with the module a bit more, perhaps your output is similar (and/or perhaps you're using ActivePerl and their port is broken).

Update: There *is* a small bug in the _ping_win32() function of Net::Ping::External (at least the version available through PPM for ActiveState). I changed the last two lines of my own copy from this:

return 1 if $result =~ /time?\d*ms/;
  return 0;
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to this:

return $result =~ /time=\d+ms/?1:0;
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and now it works fine for me. I should probably email the author with that bugfix, perhaps it only is affected in 2k, but I suspect not, the time? will positively match, then because he's missing the '=', the rest fails. I can't imagine that 98's ping prints 'time49ms'.

oh, and modifying it using fglock's and zigdon's comments, it works like you want it to :)