Bsrgvty

fping is in a Fedora package of the same name, and allows for many hosts, or a set of ip addressses.

$ fping -a -A -c 1 hosta hostb
192.168.0.20 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 1/1/0%, min/avg/max = 0.64/0.64/0.64
192.168.1.3 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 1/1/0%, min/avg/max = 0.50/0.50/0.50

fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next target in a
round-robin fashion... if a target replies, it is noted and removed from
the list

oping host1 host2 host3

Description:

oping uses ICMP packages (better known as "ping packets") to test the reachability of network hosts. It supports pinging multiple hosts in parallel using IPv4 and/or IPv6 transparently.

This package contains two command line applications: "oping" is a replacement for tools like ping(1), ping6(1) and fping(1). "noping" is an ncurses-based tool which displays statistics while pinging and highlights aberrant round-trip times.

I would suggest using GNU Parallel

parallel -u ping ::: host1 host2 host3

output will be interleaved

I know it's specifically not what you are asking for, but a bash script to accomplish this:

#!/bin/bash

for host; do
 ping -c5 "$host" 2>&1 | tail -3 &
done

wait

This will take your endpoints as command line arguments and send a 5 count ping to each one as a background process and then wait for all to finish before exiting. It will print the last three lines of the ping output which contains useful stats about the success rate and latency.

I suppose this can do for you ?

eval $(printf 'ping "%s" & ' host1 host2 host3)

It takes advantage of printf's ability to "auto-iterate" its arguments while re-using its format string over each argument. The above printf therefore produces a sequence of ping <hostname> & strings for each host provided as argument, and feeds such sequence of commands through Command Substitution to the eval command to have them executed immediately.

printf and eval commands are POSIX standard, as well as Command Substitution.

Enclosing whole such command in a subshell comprising an and-ed wait like this:

(eval $(printf 'ping "%s" & ' host1 host2 host3) && wait)

provides the ability to interrupt everything at will with a simple Ctrl+C.

Else you can control each ping command singularly through the shell's usual job control.

If your shell has support also for Process Substitutions, you may also use the following:

. <(printf 'ping "%s" & ' host1 host2 host3)

for a few chars less to type.

The gist is the same as for the eval, but feeds the sequence of pings to the . (aka source) command through the Process Substitution.

Nmap supports ping scans (ICMP) and multiple hosts:

nmap -sn -n 127.0.0.1 8.8.8.8

You can also create a file containing all of your target IPs (separated by spaces or newlines) called targets.txt. Then run:

nmap -sn -n -iL targets.txt

Options explained:

• 
  -sn Ping Scan.


• 
  -n Disable DNS resolution.


• 
  -iL Input file name.

Other interesting options in case you want to ping a really large number of targets:

• 
  -T4 Increase timing to reduce scan duration.


• 
  --min-parallelism 100 Increase number of parallel probes.


• 
  -oG <file> Write scan results to file in Grepable format.

Without creating a file

Keep in mind that you can also forgo the creation of a file and use a - to take input from either a pipe, |, or via traditional methods for redirecting output via STDIN.

Examples:

$ ( echo www.google.com; echo www.yahoo.com ) | sudo nmap -sn -n -iL -

-or-

$ sudo nmap -sn -n -iL - < <(echo www.google.com; echo www.yahoo.com)

-or-

$ sudo nmap -sn -n -iL - <<< $'www.google.comnwww.yahoo.com'

References

• Target Specification - Chapter 15. Nmap Reference Guide

By using the common xargs command to build an execute multiple ping requests:

echo host1 host2 host3 | xargs -n1 -P0 ping -c 4

Where host1 host2 host3 can be a variable number of hosts (any combination of IP or hostname).

This alters the xargs defaults to force 1 input argument per ping execution, and allow an unlimited number of parallel child processes (1 per pinged host). It is probably wise to set -P (aka --max-procs) to a sane value if intending to ping a large number of hosts (they'll all be processed; just fewer simultaneously).

Its short enough to use directly, could be added as a function to your shell profile or rc file, or turned into tiny script in your $PATH. In the examples below, -P has been set to 10 to avoid excessive resource consumption.

Example script: /usr/bin/mping

#!/bin/sh

echo $@ | xargs -n1 -P10 ping -c4

Example function within ~/.bashrc

function mping() 
 echo $@ 

And use as:

mping host1 host2 host3 ...

I do not know what you want exactly but you could change the last 8 bit-set into the decimal 255, so your hosts will receive a broadcast, actually,it will transmit ping packets to all devices that exist in a network.

ping -c 1 xx.xx.xx.255

ping google.com && ping localhost

Output

Pinging google.com [xxxxxxx] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from xxxxxxx: bytes=32 time=210ms TTL=49
Reply from ::1: time<1ms
Reply from xxxxxxx: bytes=32 time=212ms TTL=49
Reply from ::1: time<1ms
Reply from xxxxxxx: bytes=32 time=211ms TTL=49
Reply from ::1: time<1ms

Just for fun and profit...

#!/bin/sh -

# sends six "pings" to a list of hosts defined in "hosts" below

hosts="
host.a
host.b
host.c
host.d
host.e
"

for p in $hosts
do
# ONLY CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING, NOT BOTH
# dump results to file
 ping -c 6 $p >>./PINGED
# dump output to console
 ping -c 6 $p
done

exit

This could be easily enhanced. Which makes it pretty useful. :)

For additional options please see the man pages for bsd ping and Linux ping

HTH

EDIT: slightly updated to terminate the ping queries @6 pings each, and add man page options.

Use below simple command:

$ getip() tr -d '()' 2>&1 

$ getip 'hostname.number1.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number2.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number3.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number4.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number5.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number6.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number7.net'
$ getip 'hostname.number8.net'

$ cat /tmp/result.log
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY1
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY2
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY3
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY4
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY5
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY6
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY7
ABC.DEF.GHI.XY8