G'day Leo,

"... there is probably a better way to do it."

There would be many ways to this. The unqualified term "better" is highly subjective: if it relates to efficiency, then Benchmark possible solutions; if it relates to other criteria, you'll need to tell us about that or assess for yourself.

Here's one way you could do it:

$ perl -e '
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use autodie ":all";

    my @hosts = qw{8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4};
    my $command = join ";", map "ping -c3 ".$_, @hosts;
    my $result = qx{$command};

    my $re = qr{(?s:^(\S+).+?(\S+)\s+ms\s*$)};
    my $fmt = "%s min:%s avg:%s max:%s mdev:%s\n";
    open my $mh, "<", \$result;

    {
        local $/ = "PING ";
        while (<$mh>) {
            chomp;
            next unless /$re/;
            printf $fmt, $1, split /\//, $2;
        }
    }
'
8.8.8.8 min:16.929 avg:17.290 max:17.585 mdev:0.272
8.8.4.4 min:15.392 avg:15.856 max:16.284 mdev:0.365
[download]

Notes:

• Use of the strict and warnings pragmata. Highly recommended; compulsory in my opinion.
• A more succinct method for creating the command.
• Capturing the result as a single string which is subsequently processed by Opening a filehandle into an in-memory scalar.
• A simplified regex for use on an entire ping result. The four (min/avg/max/mdev) values are captured as a single entity and later split when the individual values are required.
• A format for standardised report output; used later by printf.
• Reading individual ping results by manipulating $/ (see "perlvar: Variables related to filehandles").

I've shown a number of different ways to do various things. Pick and choose the bits you want; or, use as is, if you like all of it.

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