Noticed this uses pinger, which executes the actual ping command behind the scenes and parses the output. Which makes it fragile in case there are changes in the output format of ping. Are there any good alternative libraries that can use raw sockets, etc?
This is a great example of one of the failings of the UNIX model. You can’t really parse the ping output across distributions easily, it’s built for humans to consume and until recently didn’t even report timeouts to stdout. Not to mention needing to invoke “ping6” for ipv6, which I need to add support for.
However it’s the best way to do this without needing to run gping and root.
AFAIK, ping is a setuid binary (since it needs raw socket, that is a privileged operation) so a program that implements ping by itself would need to do the same (or it would work for root).
I assumed you were talking about windows until:
> AFAIK, ping is a setuid binary
Which unfortunately means you’ve partly helped make the GP’s point for them. Under Linux, the command you’re thinking of is ifconfig, which has long been deprecated and doesn’t ship by default anymore in newer distributions.
Times change, tools move on.
How to check:
$ getcap $(which ping)
/usr/bin/ping = cap_net_raw+ep
https://blog.container-solutions.com/linux-capabilities-in-p...
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 64424 Jun 28 2019 /bin/ping-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76744 Aug 23 15:08 /bin/ping
% getcap /bin/ping
/bin/ping = cap_net_raw+ep