Sounds like a job for fork(). Fork a stack of kids to do the pinging and waiting in parallel. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
$|++;

my @hosts = qw( www.perlmonks.com  www.perl.com  www.netscape.com );
my (@pids, $count);

for my $host(@hosts) {
   sleep 1; # this limits to 1 kid per second, not actually required
   $count++;
   my $pid = fork();
   push @pids , $pid;
   die "Fork failed\n" unless defined $pid;
   next if $pid;      # get parent to reiterate and fork more kids
   my $reply = `ping -n 1 $host`; # get kids pinging, single ping
   print "I am child $count, pinged $host\n$reply\n\n";
   exit;              # kill child
}

# wait for kids to finish, no zombies on us
my $kids;
do {
    $kids = waitpid(-1,&WNOHANG);
} until $kids == -1;

print "Spawned $count kids, waited on @pids\nAll done!";

[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

In reply to Re: PING taking too long by tachyon
in thread PING taking too long by Hydro

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