fping is a ping like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a host is up. fping is different from ping in that you can specify any number of hosts on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists of hosts to ping.
Instead of trying one host until it timeouts or replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next host in a round-robin fashion. If a host replies, it is noted and removed from the list of hosts to check. If a host does not respond within a certain time limit and/or retry limit it will be considered unreachable.
Unlike ping, fping is meant to be used in scripts and its output is easy to parse.
The home page for fping, http://www.fping.com/ seems not updated and hence can download the source from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/fping and compile.
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