Just a word of warning when groking output from commandline ping...it's output is SUPER buffered, which means you won't necessarily catch anything until you flush the output. I had to use an expect script to unbuffer ping's output <before> catching it.

#!/usr/bin/expect --
# Description: unbuffer stdout of a program
# Author: Don Libes, NIST

eval spawn -noecho $argv
set timeout -1
expect
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Call the above using unbuffer <command> Hope this keeps you out of the trap I fell into!