Bping v1.2 (March 7, 2008)
Bping (pronounced "beeping") is a Windows ping replacement/alternative that beeps whenever it gets replies. I spend a lot of time diving under desks fiddling with network cables and got tired of looking up at the monitor to see how my pings were doing, and thus bping was born.
Has a bunch of enhancements over the regular ping.exe:
- beeps! (but you already knew that)
- keeps pinging until you hit control-C
- can scan an entire network and tell you at a glance what IP addresses are available and which are taken.
- can resolve ip addresses to hosts. So if you're looking for a specific computer on the network, do a scan and resolve the IPs (bping -scan -resolve).
- can function as an internet connection tester.
Note that it doesn't replace the regular ping.exe, just type "bping" instead of "ping" whenever you want to use bping. To use, download, unzip and run. If you want to install it in your windows\system32 directory so you can run it from any directory, run install.bat or just copy bping.exe to c:\windows\system32.
Usage notes:
| -h | Shows a help message and version information. |
| -q | Quiet mode. In other words, suppress the beep. |
| -i | Use the computer's internal speaker instead of the regular beep sound. |
| -t | Lets you set the timeout. By default this is .8 seconds, but you can set it however you want. For example bping 192.168.1.1 -t=.02 will ping 192.168.1.1 with a timeout of .02 seconds. |
| -s | Scan the network. For example, bping 192.168. 1.1 -s will scan the network 192.168.1.X and show all replies it gets. Note that you could also type bping 192.168.1.x -s or bping 192.168.1 -s |
| -a | When scanning the network, adding -a will show which IP addresses are available in a network range. For example, bping 192.168.1.1 -s -a will scan the 192.168.1.X network and show available networks at the end. |
| -r | Attempt to resolve hostnames of IP address. Works in both regular ping mode and scan mode. Handy dandy. |
| -m | Will output a minimal amount of data. Currently only affects network scanning. Useful if you're piping the output to a text file. |
Usage examples:
bping -h
Shows help and version information.
bping google.com
Pings google.com and beeps whenever it gets a reply.
bping 192.168.1.1
Pings 192.168.1.1 and beeps whenever it gets a reply.
bping 192.168.1.1 -r
Pings 192.168.1.1 and tries to resolve the IP address to a hostname, and beeps whenever it gets a reply.
bping 192.168.1.1 -s
Scans the network 192.168.1.X and shows whatever computers are giving replies.
bping 192.168.1.1 -s -r
Scans the network 192.168.1.X and shows whatever computers are giving replies, resolve the IP addresses to names whenever possible..
bping 192.168.1.1 -s -t=.02
Scans the network 192.168.1.X with a timeout of .02 seconds between trying each IP address.
bping google.com -s
Resolves the IP addresss for google.com and scans the other IPs in that network range.
bping 192.168.1.1 -s -a
Scans the networks 192.168.1.X and shows whatever computers are giving replies and also shows whatever IP addresses are not giving replies (i.e., which IP addresses are available).
bping 192.168.1.1 -q
Pings 192.168.1.1 and doesn't beep when it gets replies. You can add the -q option to the network scans too.
bping
Will ping a known google.com IP address. Since it doesn't resolve google.com but instead uses an IP address, you can try this whether you currently have an internet connection or not. Useful if your internet connection is down and you want to hear a beep when it comes back up.
Note that you can also use the full names of al l the switches, since anything after the first character is ignored. For example bping 192.168.1.1 -scan -available is the same as bping 192.168.1.1 -s -a. Also note that the commands can appear in any order.
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