some ping fun

The -a flag will tell ping to print a bell character whenever a ping comes back.

This is useful if you want to check when a server comes back online, and beep at you when that is the case. You can also use the -i flag to check ever 30 seconds:

$ ping -a -i 30 some_host

On OS X, you can make this a little more interesting (though there are equivalents on other platforms). ping will return successfully if any packets were returned. Using the && operator we can have something else fire off if the pinging works. The -o flag tells ping to exit when it first gets a successful ping reply.

$ ping -o -i 30 some_host && say 'the host has come back online'

Incidentally I used to have the make command aliased like so:

$ make && say -v 'good news' make complete || say -v 'bad news' make complete

This way, after a long make compile run, my computer would say "make complete" in a happy voice if the build was successful or a sad voice if the build failed.