Waiting for your server to finish rebooting? Issue the command above and you will hear a beep when it comes online. The -i 60 flag tells ping to wait for 60 seconds between ping, putting less strain on your system. Vary it to your need. The -a flag tells ping to include an audible bell in the output when a package is received (that is, when your server comes online).

Usefull for when you don't have nmap and need to find a missing host. Pings all addresses from 10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.254, modify for your subnet. Timeout set to 1 sec for speed, if running over a slow connection you should raise that to avoid missing replies. This will clean up the junk, leaving just the IP address: for i in {1..254}; do ping -c 1 -W 1 10.1.1.$i | grep 'from' | cut -d' ' -f 4 | tr -d ':'; done Show Sample Output

This command uses ping to get the routers' IP addresses to the destination host as traceroute does. If you know what I mean..

PING parameters c 1 limits to 1 pinging attempt q makes the command quiet (or silent mode) /dev/null 2>&1 is to remove the display && echo ONLINE is executed if previous command is successful (return value 0) || echo OFFLINE is executed otherwise (return value of 1 if unreachable or 2 if you're offline yourself). I personally use this command as an alias with a predefined machine name but there are at least 2 improvements that may be done. Asking for the machine name or IP Escaping the output so that it displays ONLINE in green and OFFLINE in red (for instance).

Joker wants an email if the Brand X server is down. Set a cron job for every 5 mins with this line and he gets an email when/if a ping takes longer than 3 seconds. Show Sample Output

When run on a mac, this command will bring up a dialog box in the Terminal when server HOSTNAME first responds to a ping.

I'd rather this one on Gnome, as I'm used to be listening some music while working. I've even created a bash function which receives ADDRESS as parameter.

Pings all the hosts on 192.168.1.0/24 in parallel, so it is very fast. Alive host IP addresses are echoed to stdout as pings are responded to. Show Sample Output

Audio acknowledgement for host availability. When running the command from a Linux systems, you can use "festival" or "espeak" instead of "say".

# first install arp-scan if not have it arp-scan 10.1.1.0/24 .... show ip+mac in localnet awk '/00:1b:11:dc:a9:65/ {print $1}' .... get ip associated with MAC ` backtick make do command substitution passing ip to command ping Show Sample Output

Get the IP of a hostname.

Continue to execute the command in background even though quitting the shell.

The tee (as in "T" junction) command is very useful for redirecting output to two places. Show Sample Output

What do you do when nmap is not available and you want to see the hosts responding to an icmp echo request ? This one-liner will print all hosts responding with their ipv4 address.

Ping sweep without NMAP

Waits for all pings to complete and returns ip with mac address

After this, just type: beepwhenup You need to install "beep" before this would make the beep sound. Save it in your .profile if you want to use it later WARNING: this command won't exit until it is successful. You won't be able to CONTROL+C out of it.

Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well. Show Sample Output

For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).

ignore HUP interruptions

works best in a shell script run at startup. It will ping localhost once and output to null, after it does that, acpi is called for temperature in fahrenheit and piped through to another loop that feeds notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over. Show Sample Output

Cleaner with a mailto assignment in crontab (if the command fails you get an email): MAILTO=admin@example.com 10,30,50 * * * * ping -q -c1 -w3 192.168.0.14 >/dev/null

Nasty perl one-liner that provides a sparkline of ping times. If you want a different history than the last 30, just put that value in. It (ab)uses unicode to draw the bars, inspired by https://github.com/joemiller/spark-ping . It's not the most bug-free piece of code, but what it lacks in robustness it makes up for in capability. :) If anyone has any ideas on how to make it more compact or better, I'd love to hear them. I included a ping to google in the command just as an example (and burned up 10 chars doing it!). You should use it with: $ ping example.com | $SPARKLINE_PING_COMMAND Show Sample Output