Help: /bin/ping problem with Red Hat

[Padraig at Linux.ie]

Vivek Sawant wrote:
> I am having a peculiar problem with the /bin/ping program. I am running
> Red Hat with Kernel 2.4.18-19.7.xsmp. Ping to a non-responsive (down)
> host does not terminate when invoked from my python application even
> though I use the timeout (-w) flag. Details:
> 
> My Python application has two threads: a main thread and another created
> by the main thread. The second thread invokes the following ping command
> using os.system () of Python.
> 
> /bin/ping -c 3 -s 548 -p "0003a8e4" -w 3 -l 3  <destination>
> 
> The stdout and stderr of this command has been redirected to a file.
> For a destination that is down (does not respond to pings), the above
> command never terminates while it is supposed to after 3 seconds (-w 3).

not an answer but fping is generally much nicer to interact with
programatically than ping

Pádraig.