Have a look at Net::Ping::External on CPAN (or an older version here on PerlMonks) which employs the system binaries for performing the task of pinging hosts that do not usually require priviledged access - This module has been tested to work on Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris and IRIX.

 

perl -le 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000001000010011"))'