4 Mar |
Bash + Ping: Output with Timestamp![]() |
One of the many things bash is so great to work with, is the flexibility to combinate the hardened tools at hand to create your desired output.
For example, I wanted to ping a host frequently (lets say every two minutes), and just add a readable timestamp to the output. Usually I’d use a network monitoring tool like Nagios for this task, but in this case it was just to discover when a host comes back alive and pop it onto my screen.
After a few minutes of putting pieces of bash commands together, I solved it this way:
ping -i 120 www.google.com | while read x; do echo "$(date +%T) $x"; done
Result:
08:10:24 PING www.google.com (73.94.35.76) 56(84) bytes of data.
05:10:24 64 bytes from 73.94.35.76: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=9.82 ms
05:12:24 64 bytes from 73.94.35.76: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=9.25 ms
05:14:24 64 bytes from 73.94.35.76: icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=24.4 ms
05:16:24 64 bytes from 73.94.35.76: icmp_seq=4 ttl=57 time=9.81 ms
05:18:24 64 bytes from 73.94.35.76: icmp_seq=5 ttl=57 time=60.4 ms
Mission accomplished!