When we deal with a large local area network, we may need to check the availability of other machines in the network. A machine may not be alive in two conditions: either it is not powered on, or due to a problem in the network. By using shell scripting, we can easily find out and report which machines are alive on the network. Let's see how to do it.
In this recipe, we use two methods. The first method uses ping
and the second method uses fping
. fping
is easier to use for scripts and has more features as compared to the ping
command. Usually it won't be shipped with your Linux distribution by default, so manually install it using your package manager.