Hi all. I'm the maintainer of iputils in Debian, and am pondering Debian bug #456191 [1]. The complaint is that, even when a deadline and packet count are specified (-w and -c options), ping exits as soon as it gets an error message.
Given that ping is often used in monitoring systems that, for example, try to collect statistics about packet loss, it doesn't make sense to exit upon the first receipt of an ICMP Host Unreachable error. This is especially true, as mentioned in the bug report, when the error is generated locally as a result of a target on the local network that does not answer arp requests. The bug submitter suggests changing the behavior of ping or at least adding an option to allow it to ignore some or all of these errors. Adding a command line option to ignore any ICMP errors would be trivial. I'd like to get additional opinions about what to do, though. And, of course, I'd like any change to ping to be done in the upstream git repository and not be unique to Debian. Thanks. noah [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=456191
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