Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.clark.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.cac.psu.edu!magic.cac.psu.edu!dn5 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: Re: modification to /sbin/ping Message-ID: <27usa4$jvd@genesis.ait.psu.edu> From: D. Jay Newman <dn5@psu.edu> Date: 24 Sep 1993 13:22:12 GMT References: <1868@optigfx.optigfx.com> Distribution: world Organization: Penn State NNTP-Posting-Host: magic.cac.psu.edu X-UserAgent: Nuntius v1.1.1d20 X-XXMessage-ID: <A8C86C371D013BCA@magic.cac.psu.edu> X-XXDate: Fri, 24 Sep 93 09:19:51 GMT Lines: 22 In article <BLYMN.93Sep24211709@mallee.awadi.com.au> Brett Lymn, blymn@mallee.awadi.com.au writes: >... The moral of the story is non-standard >breaks things horribly when you move out of the non-standard >environment, so if you have a script that relies on the return value >of ping and you try to use that script on a system where ping always >returns 0 you will have a broken script. So how about if a version of ping was created called zping (or something) which *did* return a status value? That way the script would fail in a predicatable manner which is easily debugged (hey, get zping here!) when put on a foreign system. If zping became popular, it would replace ping (however, ping would be defined as a link to zping, for eternal compatability with older scripts). While this may be slightly tounge-in-cheek, the idea seems reasonable to me. ()()()()()()()()()()()()() ETS--Education Technology Services ()()()()() D. Jay Newman ! We were all born to live with magic, the dn5@psu.edu ! entire human race. We're never mor