Linux and Unix Shell Programming

27.1. pingall

I wrote pingall quite a few years ago as part of a general reporting script that ran during the night. It pings all the hosts held in the hosts file.

The script cats the /etc/hosts file and greps out all lines that do not begin with a #.A while loop then reads in lines of filtered text. Awk is used to assign the first field of the filtered text to the variable ADDR. Using a for loop, each address is then pinged.

Here’s the script.

						$ pg pingall 
#!/bin/sh 
# pingall 

# grab /etc/hosts and ping each address 
cat /etc/hosts| grep -v '^#' | while read LINE 
do 
  ADDR=`awk '{print $1}'` 
  for MACHINE in $ADDR 
  do 
    ping -s -c1 $MACHINE 
  done 
done 

The pingall script can easily expanded to include reporting functions of other network utilities. ...