Bug 40068

Hi Craig.

I just took a brief look at your reported problems.

I've just checked with the 7.1 version there the manpage explicitly talks about
-c only accouting for sending packages:

     -c count
             Stop after sending count ECHO_REQUEST packets. With deadline op-
             tion, ping waits for count ECHO_REPLY packets, until the timeout
             expires.

So i am a little puzzled here as i can't 'reproduce' the things you stated.

If you could verify again with rpm -qi iputils which version you have and maybe
send me the ping manpage or do a rpm -qf /usr/share/man/man8/ping.8.gz

Read ya, Phil

{ Thanks for the quick reply! }

Interesting! That's different to what my man page says but I have the right
package (well ... more on that later) ...

[craig@cnote webmonitor]$ rpm -qf /usr/share/man/man8/ping.8.gz
iputils-20001110-1

[craig@cnote webmonitor]$ rpm -qi iputils
Name        : iputils                      Relocations: /usr
Version     : 20001110                          Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.
Release     : 1                             Build Date: Tue 16 Jan 2001 05:34:23
PM SAST
Install date: Thu 10 May 2001 11:56:36 AM SAST      Build Host:
porky.devel.redhat.com
Group       : System Environment/Daemons    Source RPM: iputils-20001110-1.src.rpm
Size        : 137254                           License: BSD
Packager    : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
Summary     : The ping program for checking to see if network hosts are alive.
Description :
The iputils package contains ping, a basic networking tool.  The ping
command sends a series of ICMP protocol ECHO_REQUEST packets to a
specified network host and can tell you if that machine is alive and
receiving network traffic.

[craig@cnote webmonitor]$ rpm --verify iputils
[craig@cnote webmonitor]$

Seems to be the right version. I did have rpm core dump on me while upgrading
the package (perhaps because I mv'ed the rpm file while it was busy from another
session) but I re-ran the rpm command (-Uvh) and it succeeded so I assumed that
I was running the 7.1 ping rather than 7.0.

Here's a snippet from the man page:
DESCRIPTION
     Ping uses the ICMP protocol's mandatory ECHO_REQUEST datagram to elicit
     an ICMP ECHO_RESPONSE from a host or gateway.  ECHO_REQUEST datagrams
     (``pings'') have an IP and ICMP header, followed by a ``struct timeval''
     and then an arbitrary number of ``pad'' bytes used to fill out the pack-
     et.  The options are as follows: Other options are:
 
     -b      Allow pinging a broadcast address.
 
     -c count
             Stop after sending (and receiving) count ECHO_RESPONSE packets.

{end snippet}

Perhaps all is not well in rpm land - that is the 7.0 page methinks.
Lemme force things:

[root@cnote RPMS]# rpm -ivh --force iputils-20001110-1.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:iputils                ########################################### [100%]

Hmmm ... the man page still shows the old stuff but zless'ing the ping.gz man
file shows the right text. Perhaps man has cached the old page in some fashion
... Upgrading man to the 7.1 version ... {pause} ...

man ping:
{snip}
 -c count
             Stop after sending count ECHO_REQUEST packets. With deadline op-
             tion, ping waits for count ECHO_REPLY packets, until the timeout
             expires.
{snip}

Better! OK. That's the first bit of the problem solved. Thanks!

It also clarifies the second bit in that it can send more than 10 packets.

Magic. Thank you! Sorry for not doing more exhaustive checking before reporting
this.

Final note.

The new man page also clarifies the return code stuff I mentioned. I was
only seeing error codes of 1 and 0 but expecting code 2 when only some packets
were dropped (the old man page seemed to indicate this and it wasn't happening).
The 'new' man page clarifies that with both -w and -c I'll get a return
code of 1, not 2 in that case.

Thanks again!

--Craig