Pinger.sh: A Simple Script for Checking Server Response Times

Hey everyone,

Today I want to share a simple little shell script that I've found surprisingly useful over the years. A while back, I came across a post on Reddit where someone was asking for an easy way to ping a list of servers to find the one with the fastest response time. I whipped up a quick script to solve the problem, and I've honestly ended up using it far more than I ever expected.

I call it pinger.sh, and its job is simple: it takes a file full of IP addresses or domain names, pings each one, and gives you a nicely formatted, sorted list of the results from fastest to slowest.

It's perfect for a couple of common tasks:

Doing a quick uptime check on a list of your personal servers.
Finding the fastest software mirror or public DNS server from your specific location.

Examples in Action

For instance, I can use it to get a quick status update on my personal servers to make sure everything is running smoothly:

Make sense, they are all in the same "region" on DO

Or, I can use it to quickly find the fastest public DNS resolver from my current location:

Google is almost always the quickest for me

The Script

The script itself is a short and straightforward Bash script. It reads each line from the file you provide, pings the address once, and then uses a powerful sort | column pipeline at the end to format everything into a neat, easy-to-read table.

#!/bin/bash

# Check if the argument is provided
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "Please provide a filename as an argument."
  exit 1
fi

# Read each line of the file
while read -r address; do
  # setting timeout, piping error
  # Execute ping; if it fails, skip to the next address
  result=$(ping -c 1 -W 2 "$address" 2>/dev/null) || continue
  # Extract the ping time from the result using cut
  time=$(echo "$result" | grep "time=" | cut -d "=" -f 4)

  # Print the address and the ping time
  echo "$address $time"
done <"$1" | sort -k 2n | column -t -N "Address,Speed"

How to Use It

Save the code above to a file named pinger.sh.
Make the script executable from your terminal: chmod +x pinger.sh
Create a text file (e.g., servers.txt) with one IP address or domain name per line.
Run the script and pass it your text file as an argument: ./pinger.sh servers.txt

It's a simple tool, but it's a great example of how a small script can solve a common problem in a very elegant way.

EDIT: Github Gist

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM