Sorting IP in BASH

I was working on a little script to test if a bunch of hosts is reachable by ping.

The first version of the script was ready in a minute, but sending pings to hundred hosts in sequence takes some time. Especially if the hosts are down the ping takes a full second until timeout.

To call the pings in parallel is just wrapping the ping command in a ( ... ) &. But this will change the order of the output and the parent script ends before the child scripts do.

To get back the synchronization and having the output sorted I piped the whole output to sort.

As sort uses the alphabetical order to sort the IP Addresses the order is not as expected. But sort has a flag -V to sort versions - which are technically the same as IP addresses: dot separated numbers.

Here comes the example:

for i in $(seq 1 10); do
  (
    ip=$(printf "10.0.0.%s" "$i")
 
    if ping -W 1 -c 1 $ip > /dev/null; then
      printf "%s	e[32m%se[0m" "$ip" "up"
    else
      printf "%s	e[31m%se[0m" "$ip" "down"
    fi
  ) &
done | sort -V

Btw.: The watch command supports a --color flag which allows to run the script in a loop.