Ping once and return true/false Posted on May 19, 2014

The ping command will usually try pinging a device forever, returning the response time after each pingback. If you want to ping a device once and use the answer to perform an action, use the following snippet:

ping -c 1 [your ip or hostname] > /dev/null

This command will either return 1 on failure or 0 on success.

In the example below, we use the && operator to perform an action if and only if the ping to “homeserver” was successful:

ping -c 1 homeserver >/dev/null && echo 'Successfully pinged device!'

This can be a great way to monitor the presence of a device on the network for a dead man’s switch for example.