I am writing a program. This is what I think it should do:

Open, clobber and write a file called PING.TXT
ping a site until it can't anymore then email me

Here's what I have so far: 
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict ;
use Mail::Sendmail;
use diagnostics ;

open (PING, '+> C:\PING\PING.TXT') or die "Can't create file; $!" ;
# intentionally clobbering file

my $pingstat = 0 ;
my $ping = `ping -t 132.163.4.101` ;

until ($pingstat) {
  $ping ;

} else {

  $pingstat = 1 ;

} my %mail = ( To   =>   'lmoran@wtsg.com',
          From =>   'ellem@opt_online.net',
          Subject =>"The PING is dead!",
          Message =>"Go read your PING log"
          );

format PING =
@<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
$ping
.

[download]
I have all manner of fancy plans after I get this working but the until loop seems to be wrong. I have compared it to the ones I have written before and to the explanation in the Camel (PP3 pp. 112-116) and I have noticed that I have no if statement but I don't know what I would put in an if statement anyway. (That makes me a pretty poor programmer doesn't it?) I say this becuase I want to say:

ping this until you can't, else change the value of the variable $pingstat to 1 and email me to go read my logs.
--
lmoran@wtsg.com
There's more than one way to do it, just don't use my way.

In reply to until Loop Question by ellem

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