-a | Audible ping. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-A | Adaptive ping. Interpacket interval adapts to round-trip time, so that effectively not more than one (or more, if preload is set) unanswered probes are present in the network. Minimal interval is 200msec for any user other than the super-user. On networks with low RTT (round trip time), this mode is essentially equivalent to flood mode (see -f, below). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-b | Allow pinging a broadcast address. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-B | Do not allow ping to change source address of probes. The address is bound to one selected when ping starts. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-mmark | use mark to tag the packets going out. This is useful for variety of reasons in the kernel such as using policy routing to select specific outbound processing. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-ccount | Stop after sending count ECHO_REQUEST packets. With the deadline option, ping waits for count ECHO_REPLY packets, until the timeout expires. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-d | Set the SO_DEBUG option on the socket being used. This socket option is not used by Linux kernel. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-f | Flood ping. For every ECHO_REQUEST sent, a period ('.') is printed, while for every ECHO_REPLY received, a backspace is printed. This provides a rapid display of how many packets are being dropped. If an interval is not given (see -i, below), it sets interval to zero and outputs packets as fast as they come back or one hundred times per second, whichever is more. Only the super-user may use this option with an interval of zero. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-iinterval | Wait interval seconds between sending each packet. The default is to wait for one second between each packet normally, or not to wait at all in flood mode (see -f, above). Only super-user may set interval to values less 0.2 seconds. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-Iinterface-address | Set source address to specified interface address. Argument may be a numeric IP address or the name of the device. When pinging IPv6 link-local addresses, this option is required. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-lpreload | If preload is specified, ping sends that many packets not waiting for reply. Only the super-user may select a preload of more than 3. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-L | Suppress loopback of multicast packets. This flag only applies if the ping destination is a multicast address. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-Nnioption | Send ICMPv6 Node Information Queries (RFC 4620), instead of Echo Requests. nioption may be one of the following:
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-n | Numeric output only. No attempt will be made to look up symbolic names for host addresses. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
-ppattern | You may specify up to 16 'pad' bytes to fill out the packet you send. This is useful for diagnosing. Round-trip times and packet loss statistics are computed. If duplicate packets are received, they are not included in the packet loss calculation, although the round trip time of these packets is used in calculating the minimum/average/maximum round-trip time numbers. When the specified number of packets have been sent (and received) or if the program is terminated with a SIGINTsignal, a brief summary is displayed. Shorter current statistics can be obtained without termination of process with signal SIGQUIT. If ping does not receive any reply packets at all it will exit with code 1. If a packet count and deadline are both specified, and fewer than count packets are received by the time the deadline has arrived, it will also exit with code 1. On other error it exits with code 2. Otherwise, it exits with code 0. This makes it possible to use the exit code to see if a host is alive or not. ping is intended for use in network testing, measurement and management. Because of the load it can impose on the network, it is unwise to use ping during normal operations or from automated scripts. ICMP packet detailsAn IP header without options is 20 bytes. An ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packet contains an additional 8 bytes worth of ICMP header followed by an arbitrary amount of data. When a packetsize is given, this indicated the size of this extra piece of data (the default is 56). Thus the amount of data received inside of an IP packet of type ICMP ECHO_REPLY will always be 8 bytes more than the requested data space (the ICMP header). If the data space is at least of size of struct timeval, ping uses the beginning bytes of this space to include a timestamp which it uses in the computation of round trip times. If the data space is shorter, no round trip times are given. Duplicate and damaged packetsping will report duplicate and damaged packets. Duplicate packets should never occur, and seem to be caused by inappropriate link-level retransmissions. Duplicates may occur in many situations and are rarely (if ever) a good sign, although the presence of low levels of duplicates may not always be cause for alarm. Damaged packets are serious cause for alarm and often indicate broken hardware somewhere in the ping packet's path (in the network or in the hosts). Trying different data patternsThe (inter)network layer should never treat packets differently depending on the data contained in the data portion. Unfortunately, such as all ones or all zeros, or a pattern right at the edge, such as almost all zeros. It isn't necessarily enough to specify a data pattern of all zeros (for example) on the command line because the pattern that is of interest is at the data link level, and the relationship between what you type and what the controllers transmit can be complicated. This means that if you have as not much that can be done about this. ExamplesPing the host google.com to see if it is alive. Ping the host google.com once. Output will resemble the following: Related pagesRelated commandshost — Convert a hostname to an IP address and vice versa. ifconfig — View or modify the configuration of network interfaces. netstat — Print information about network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, masquerade connections, and multicast memberships. rpcinfo — Report information about remote procedure calls. traceroute — Trace the route that packets take to a remote host. |