How to ping in C++ under Linux

Question

I have to call ping from C++ code. I'd like to easily read the output for further utilization.

I have come up with two solutions:

• use a fork and a pipe, redirect ping output to the pipe and then parse it
• find a library suited for the purpose to use a ping(ip_addresss) function directly

I'd like the latter, but I didn't find anything that was clearly a standard solution.

How would you do it?

Answer 1

I would go with your first option. Linux is built around the concept of having small, specialized apps which do one thing really well, communicating with pipes. Your app shouldn't include a library to implement ping, since there is already a built-in command to do it, and it works very well!