Colour a terminal screen red or green depending on ping result
A quick and dirty C / ncurses program to repeatedly ping an IP and colour the whole terminal background in red or green, depending on whether there was a ping reply.
Useful when you want a simple, big, easy to spot indicator for when an IP starts or stops pinging. Hypothetical example, when you are waiting for your broadband to start working again...
Features:
- Small / lightweight
- Supports IPv4 and IPv6
- Selectable delay between pings
- Displays last ping attempt time
- Displays "down since" time, if known
- Possible to set a default IP in source file
Requirements:
- C compiler
- ncurses development library
- /bin/ping which supports IPv6 addresses
- A target remote IP to monitor
- A terminal to run it on
Compilation:
cc -o linkstat linkstat.c -lncurses
Usage:
If you set a default ping IP in the source before compiling it, you can start it with no arguments. The ping interval will be 5 seconds.
Otherwise:
./linkstat [-6] [-n interval] <IPv4, IPv6 or hostname>
- -n interval - in seconds
- -6 - force IPv6 if using a hostname with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
Note: if the remote host is down the actual interval will be interval + 2 seconds due to the 2s wait in the ping code.
An email saying "Hi, I found and use linkstat and I think it's the best thing ever!"* would be very much appreciated :)
* Or, you know, your own message...