ping

[MSherrill at compuserve.com]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000 02:52:15 GMT, Greg Fortune
<gfortune_ewu at ispchannel.com> wrote:

>Why aren't we using the standard Linux ping as a command?  Is ping.py 
>somehow faster?

The standard Linux ping is standard only on Linux.  And maybe not even
on all Linuxes.  But Python is cross-platform, and it crosses to some
odd platforms.

I wrote a utility program (not Python) to parse and normalize ping
output so it could be loaded into a database.  (The customer used ping
to periodically check troublesome network segments, I think.  ICBW.)
Anyway, they had four versions of ping that produced identifiably
different outputs.  

The Windows NT ping was particularly evil.  (Could be NT redirection
is the evil; I don't know.)  NT's ping, redirected to a file,
terminated each line with 0x0D 0x0D 0x0A.  Looked fine until you
dumped it in hex.

-- 
Mike Sherrill
Information Management Systems