Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Return status of the ping command

The ping command returns the exit status 0 when it succeeds and returns non-zero when it fails. Successful means the destination host is reachable, whereas Failure is when the destination host is unreachable.

The return status can be obtained as follows:

$ ping domain -c2 
if [ $? -eq0 ]; 
then 
  echo Successful ; 
else 
  echo Failure 
fi