HI there, if anyone can help me it will be much appreciated. I need to make a bourne shell script which will ping a total of 30 servers to make sure they are alive and then print the records onto a file or screen. i was thinking of putting the names of the servers in a text file and then do a for while loop but im young at unix scripting and need some help or a script would be perfect, the flashier the better. please mail me on kasser.ayubi@steria.co.uk

Homework ? PING=`which ping` for hostname in `cat hostlist` ; do $PING $hostname if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then echo "$hostname reachable" else echo "$hostname unreachable" fi done Take this idea and make it platform independent. You want to assign to PING, a command that will try a fixed number of times then return an result code. For example on HP-UX ping hostname -n 1 >/dev/null 2>&1

thanks for that reply, very helpfull, anyother replies are appreciated