our @hosts = qw /www.yahoo.com www.cpan.org
                 www.perlmonks.org bob.net/;
our %host_state = ();

#our @alive = `fping -a @hosts`;
# 2>/dev/null keeps us from get error messages for fping
our @alive = `fping -a @hosts 2> /dev/null`;
chomp @alive;
for my $host (@alive) {
    $host_state{$host} = 1;
}
for my $host (@hosts) {
    print $host, " is ";
    print $host_state{$host} ? "alive" : "dead";
    print "\n";
}
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