Again, remember the output will vary depending on operating system (and even the version of ping). This isn't ideal, but it will work fine in many situations (where you know the machines the script will be running on)
It's hard to say what your question is, but there are some alternatives.
If you mean to literally execute a request using the ICMP ping protocol, you can get an ICMP library and execute the ping request directly. Google "Python ICMP" to find things like this icmplib. You might want to look at scapy, also.
This will be much faster than using os.system("ping " + ip ).
If you mean to generically "ping" a box to see if it's up, you can use the echo protocol on port 7.
For echo, you use the socket library to open the IP address and port 7. You write something on that port, send a carriage return ("\r\n") and then read the reply.
If you mean to "ping" a web site to see if the site is running, you have to use the http protocol on port 80.
For or properly checking a web server, you use urllib2 to open a specific URL. (/index.html is always popular) and read the response.
There are still more potential meaning of "ping" including "traceroute" and "finger".
You may find Noah Gift's presentation Creating Agile Commandline Tools With Python. In it he combines subprocess, Queue and threading to develop solution that is capable of pinging hosts concurrently and speeding up the process. Below is a basic version before he adds command line parsing and some other features. The code to this version and others can be found here
#!/usr/bin/env python2.5
from threading import Thread
import subprocess
from Queue import Queue
num_threads = 4
queue = Queue()
ips = ["10.0.1.1", "10.0.1.3", "10.0.1.11", "10.0.1.51"]
#wraps system ping command
def pinger(i, q):
"""Pings subnet"""
while True:
ip = q.get()
print "Thread %s: Pinging %s" % (i, ip)
ret = subprocess.call("ping -c 1 %s" % ip,
shell=True,
stdout=open('/dev/null', 'w'),
stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
if ret == 0:
print "%s: is alive" % ip
else:
print "%s: did not respond" % ip
q.task_done()
#Spawn thread pool
for i in range(num_threads):
worker = Thread(target=pinger, args=(i, queue))
worker.setDaemon(True)
worker.start()
#Place work in queue
for ip in ips:
queue.put(ip)
#Wait until worker threads are done to exit
queue.join()
I did something similar this way, as an inspiration:
import urllib
import threading
import time
def pinger_urllib(host):
"""
helper function timing the retrival of index.html
TODO: should there be a 1MB bogus file?
"""
t1 = time.time()
urllib.urlopen(host + '/index.html').read()
return (time.time() - t1) * 1000.0
def task(m):
"""
the actual task
"""
delay = float(pinger_urllib(m))
print '%-30s %5.0f [ms]' % (m, delay)
# parallelization
tasks = []
URLs = ['google.com', 'wikipedia.org']
for m in URLs:
t = threading.Thread(target=task, args=(m,))
t.start()
tasks.append(t)
# synchronization point
for t in tasks:
t.join()
Here's a short snippet using subprocess. The check_call method either returns 0 for success, or raises an exception. This way, I don't have to parse the output of ping. I'm using shlex to split the command line arguments.
import subprocess
import shlex
command_line = "ping -c 1 www.google.comsldjkflksj"
args = shlex.split(command_line)
try:
subprocess.check_call(args,stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
print "Website is there."
except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
print "Couldn't get a ping."
If you want something actually in Python, that you can play with, have a look at Scapy:
from scapy.all import *
request = IP(dst="www.google.com")/ICMP()
answer = sr1(request)
That's in my opinion much better (and fully cross-platform), than some funky subprocess calls. Also you can have as much information about the answer (sequence ID.....) as you want, as you have the packet itself.
I develop a library that I think could help you. It is called icmplib (unrelated to any other code of the same name that can be found on the Internet) and is a pure implementation of the ICMP protocol in Python.
It is completely object oriented and has simple functions such as the classic ping, multiping and traceroute, as well as low level classes and sockets for those who want to develop applications based on the ICMP protocol.
Here are some other highlights:
Can be run without root privileges.
You can customize many parameters such as the payload of ICMP packets and the traffic class (QoS).
Cross-platform: tested on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Fast and requires few CPU / RAM resources unlike calls made with subprocess.
Lightweight and does not rely on any additional dependencies.
To install it (Python 3.6+ required):
pip3 install icmplib
Here is a simple example of the ping function:
host = ping('1.1.1.1', count=4, interval=1, timeout=2, privileged=True)
if host.is_alive:
print(f'{host.address} is alive! avg_rtt={host.avg_rtt} ms')
else:
print(f'{host.address} is dead')
Set the "privileged" parameter to False if you want to use the library without root privileges.
you might try socket to get ip of the site and use scrapy to excute icmp ping to the ip.
import gevent
from gevent import monkey
# monkey.patch_all() should be executed before any library that will
# standard library
monkey.patch_all()
import socket
from scapy.all import IP, ICMP, sr1
def ping_site(fqdn):
ip = socket.gethostbyaddr(fqdn)[-1][0]
print(fqdn, ip, '\n')
icmp = IP(dst=ip)/ICMP()
resp = sr1(icmp, timeout=10)
if resp:
return (fqdn, False)
else:
return (fqdn, True)
sites = ['www.google.com', 'www.baidu.com', 'www.bing.com']
jobs = [gevent.spawn(ping_site, fqdn) for fqdn in sites]
gevent.joinall(jobs)
print([job.value for job in jobs])