Thread: I need your brainpower...

I want to write a small utility that checks to see if a host is live, then either beeps or plays a WAV file if the network connection goes down. system("ping xyz"); doesn't cut it, as it has no way to tell if the pings failed or not. I looked in the winsock.h file, hoping I'd find some clues in it to do what I need, but no luck. Anyone got any ideas to get me headed in the right direction?
Thanks!

Mark

Originally posted by Util_Mark
system("ping xyz"); doesn't cut it, as it has no way to tell if the pings failed or not.

I thought it returned 0 when successful and nonzero when it failed.

I must check.

(Edit)
Yes it does.

It works.

Code:

    int status1 = system("ping strandmark.com > nul");
    if (status1 == 0)
        cout << "First succeeded" << endl;
    int status2 = system("ping nonexistant-123.com > nul");
    if (status2 != 0)
        cout << "Second failed" << endl;

Will print

Code:

First succeeded
Second failed

YOU ARE AWESOME vVv!!!! Thanks!!!!

OK, it works, BUT if I do a loop to check at different intervals, then unplug the network cable of the PC that I'm testing against, the code still says that the host is alive, when in reality it should have failed since it's network connection doesn't exist anymore.

Do you think I need to flush the ARP table of the address I'm testing against, or do this have nothing to do with it? Weird...

-Mark