fping 3

fping is a program to send ICMP echo probes to network hosts, similar to ping, but much better performing when pinging multiple hosts. fping has a long long story: Roland Schemers did publish a first version of it in 1992 and it has established itself since then as a standard tool.

Current maintainer:
David Schweikert <david@schweikert.ch>

Website:
http://fping.org/

Mailing-list:
https://groups.google.com/group/fping-users

Installation

If you want to install fping from source, proceed as follows:

0. Run ./autogen.sh (only if you got the source from github)
1. Run ./configure with the correct arguments (see: ./configure --help)
2. Run make; make install
3. Make fping either setuid, or, if under Linux: sudo setcap cap_net_raw+ep fping
4. Have a look at the fping(8) manual for usage help (fping -h will also give a minimal help output)

Usage

See: fping man-page

IPv6 support

You can can compile fping with support for IPv6 addresses. A separate binary is used for that, called fping6. To build it, use ./configure --enable-ipv6 (possibly combined with --enable-ipv4 to also build fping for IPv4). E.g.:

# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-ipv4 --enable-ipv6
# make
# make install
# sudo setcap cap_net_raw+ep /usr/local/bin/fping*

Credits

Original author: Roland Schemers (schemers@stanford.edu) Previous maintainer: RL "Bob" Morgan (morgan@stanford.edu) Initial IPv6 Support: Jeroen Massar (jeroen@unfix.org / jeroen@ipng.nl) Other contributors: see ChangeLog