Subject: EWNTips: Pinging multiple computers simultaneously 
From: tips@elementktips.com
To: ewntips@elementktips.com
Message-ID: <bulk.11090.20000605173036@mail.elementktips.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 17:32:46 -0400


Pinging multiple computers simultaneously

As an administrator of a TCP/IP-based network, on occasion you might find it 
necessary to ping several computers on your network. For example, you might 
want to ping multiple computers in order to identify which IP addresses are 
currently in use. An easy way to ping multiple computers on the same subnet 
is to use the FOR command. Consider the following command:

FOR /L %g IN (1,1,254) DO ping -n 2 200.200.200.%g

In English, this command states that we want to "do" the ping command as long 
as the %g variable is within the range from 1 to 254. We specify the range for 
%g by using the syntax (start, step, end). Start indicates the starting value 
for %g (1 in this example), step indicates the number with which we want to 
increment %g (1 in our example), and end indicates the number at which we want 
to stop pinging. We've also limited the number of pings to 2 by using -n 2 
(instead of the typical 4 for each computer. 

When you run this command, you'll see that your computer pings the following 
IP addresses:

200.200.200.1
200.200.200.2
200.200.200.3
...
200.200.200.254

This tip was contributed by Rafael Sanchez, fariceo@yahoo.com.