Pinging hosts on the network with ICMP

An ICMP ping is the most common type of network scanning you have ever encountered. It is very easy to open a command-line prompt or Terminal and type ping www.google.com. How difficult is that from inside a Python program? This recipe shows you an example of a Python ping.

Getting ready

You need the superuser or administrator privilege to run this recipe on your machine.

How to do it...

You can lazily write a Python script that calls the system ping command-line tool, as follows:

import subprocess 
import shlex 
 
command_line = "ping -c 1 www.google.com" 
args = shlex.split(command_line) 
try: 
      subprocess.check_call(args,stdout=subprocess.PIPE,\ 
stderr=subprocess.PIPE) 
    print ("Google web server is up!") 
except subprocess.CalledProcessError: 
    print ("Failed to get ping.") 

However, in many circumstances, the system's ping executable may not be available or may be inaccessible. In this case, we need a pure Python script to do that ping. Note...