A multi-platform port ping.
pping is designed to give you the easiest possible solution for discovering ports from a shell. The design was heavily oriented towards the terminology and behavior of the classic ping tool.
pping is developed using Microsoft .NET 6. pping uses logic from:
- Our package cfUtils.
- McMaster CommandLineUtils McMaster.Extensions.CommandLineUtils
The easiest way to get pping running on your machine is to use chocolatey and install it:
choco install ppingAlternatively you can simply download the 7z-package from codingfreaks.de and unzip the files in any directory. It will make sense to add this directory to your PATH variable.
winget We are NOT supporting the new Windows 11 package manager "winget" as long as this product requires complex installers like msi etc. We are providing an EXE and a json basically and thus think that an MSI for this would be overwhelming.
The simplest possible call would be to check a single port on a DNS address or IP address. The following snippets checks, if port 80 is open on the address google.com:
pping google.com 80The result will be something like this:
> pping google.com 80
Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80 4 times:
# 1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:-). 4 pings sent (4 OPEN, 0 CLOSED)By default pping will try to reach a port 4 times.If you want pping to resolve the IP address behind a DNS entry just add the -res parameter:
pping google.com 80 -res
Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80 4 times:
# 1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:2a00:1450:4005:808::200e). 4 pings sent (4 OPEN, 0 CLOSED)You can perform constant pings too:
pping google.com 80 -tThis will perform and "endless" ping to the address.
On of the common scenarios to use ping is to determine, if a certain service is already up. Consider a situation where you restart a server and want to know, when RDP connections are possible. A simple ping would'nt help you here because even if the machine is up, the RDP port (3389) might no be reachable yet.
pping can help you in this situation:
pping myserver.local 3389 -t -asYou perform a permanent pping (-t) but you tell pping to stop pinging when the port is reachable the first time (-as). "as" is the abbreviation for "autostop".
If you want to check lets say 2 ports (http and https) on a certain address. Just delimit the ports by ,:
pping google.com 80,443 -d
Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80,443 4 times:
# 1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 5 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 6 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 7 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 8 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 443 with timeout 1: OPEN
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:-). 8 pings sent (6 OPEN, 2 CLOSED)It is also possible to define a range of ports by delimiting them with '-':
pping google.com 80-82 -d
Starting pinging host google.com on TCP port(s) 80-82 4 times:
# 1 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 2 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 3 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 4 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 5 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 6 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 7 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 8 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 9 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 10 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 80 with timeout 1: OPEN
# 11 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 81 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
# 12 -> Pinging host google.com (IP:-) on TCP port 82 with timeout 1: CLOSED (TimedOut)
Finished pinging host google.com (IP:-). 12 pings sent (4 OPEN, 8 CLOSED)The following table lists all available options:
| Abbreviation | Full name | Sample | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| t | endless | -t | If set, the app will run infinitely. (see -a option). |
| r | repeats | -r 10 | Number of repeats in a non-endless pping (defaults to 4) |
| tim | timeout | -tim 2 | Defines the timeout in seconds the app will wait for each requests to return. |
| l | logo | -logo | If provided, pping will print detailed header informations. |
| res | resolve | -res | If provided, pping will resolve the IP address for each pping. |
| a | autostop | -a | If set, the app will stop working when it gets the first OPEN-result. |
| els | elsucc | -els | If set, the app will return the amount of successful port requests as the result code. |
| elf | elfail | -elf | If set, the app will return error level 0 on any open ping and error level 1 if all pings resulted in closed port. |
| w | waittime | -w 2000 | Defines a time in milliseconds to wait between calls. Defaults to 1000. |
| d | detailed | -d | If provided, pping will try to write reason details at closed ports to te console. |
| 4 | ipv4 | -4 | If provided, pping will use IPv4 for resolutions. |
| 6 | ipv6 | -6 | If provided, pping will use IPv6 for resolutions. |
