fping For Linux

fping is a completely free and open source command-line ping like program that uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a network host is up or down.

While it has been designed especially for GNU/Linux operating systems, it can ping any host. fping is different from the original ping program, as users can specify any number of network hosts, as well as the ability to specify a file containing a list of hosts to ping.

Unlike ping, fping is engineered to be integrated in scripts. Its output is easy to parse, and instead of trying one host until it replies or timeouts, it will send out a ping packet and move on to the next one.

The software offers a wide range of powerful command-line options that can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘sudo ./fping -h’ command in a terminal emulator. Among these, we can mention that ability to display targets that are alive or by address, to specify the amount of ping data to send, to set exponential backoff factor to f, to specify the number of pings to send to each target, to display elapsed time on return packets, as well as to set the source address.

Installing fping in a GNU/Linux operating system is an extremely easy task, as you will have to download the source package, save it on your Home directory, unpack it, open a Terminal app, move to the location where you have extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/fping-3.10), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compiled the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.