You probably don't want to use Net::Ping to this as this will use the TCP echo service and all you are doing is changing the port to which it tries to connect to this service. I would suggest if you just want to check whether you have a particular port open on a particular machine you do something like:

use IO::Socket;
                                                                      
+          
my  $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => 'localhost',
                                  PeerPort => 'http(80)',
                                  Proto    => 'tcp');
                                                                      
+          
                                                                      
+          
print $sock ? "alive" : "not alive";
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/J\