From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Apr  9 08:14:05 1997
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To: peter@spinner.DIALix.COM (Peter Wemm)
cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: new ping option 
In-reply-to: Your message of "09 Apr 1997 13:51:00 GMT."
             <860593860.311485@haywire.DIALix.COM> 
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 1997 08:13:44 -0700
Message-ID: <17886.860598824@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> Well, how would the semantics work?  Send a single ping, wait for a maximum
> of 'n' seconds and return a status?  There is a program called fping (now
> a port) that already does this, and can do multiple machines at once.

It sounds like fping is just the ticket then.  Why not simply
something like this in your .bashrc for your beeping ping?

function bping {
	while :; do
		if /usr/local/sbin/fping -q -t 250 $1; then
			echo "$1 is alive!!"
			break;
		fi
	done
}

See, for someone like me, a beep is even less than relevant.  My PC
has such a weak speaker that I can't even hear it over the fans and so I
might as well not have a speaker at all.  For myself, I'd substitute in
something like ``xmessage "$1 is alive!"'' so I could actually see it.

In other words, one man's feep is another man's popup notifier and
ping shouldn't be making unwarranted assumptions! :-)

					Jordan