I could swear on my life that i tried putting in "icmp" and it didn't make a difference, however I tried you snippet and it worked perfectly!!!! Thank you so much.

I have also come up with an alternative way of doing this without using Net::Ping, although I have heard that it is better to use Net::Ping for various reasons. for those who are interested, see my code below.

your code

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Net::Ping;

my $host = "127.0.0.1";
my $ping=Net::Ping->new("icmp");
if ($ping->ping($host,2)){
    print "$host is alive";
}else{ print "$host unreachable" }
[download]

My alternative code (very sloppy but it did the trick)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

checkup();



sub checkup {
my $host = "209.94.100.100";
my $packloss = `ping -c 1 -s 1 $host | grep loss | awk '{print \$7}'`;
   $packloss = substr($packloss,0,length($packloss) -1);


if ($packloss ne "100%") {
print "$host is up with $packloss packet loss\n";
}else {
        print "$host is down with $packloss packet loss\n";
}
[download]