Simple Network Ping Tool with Shell and HTML

In this article we are going to see how we can create a simple linux script that we can use to ping network nodes and print the results from HTML file. We will use shell as the scripting language.

We will achieve the printable ping results by specifying the name of the HTML file to output the results to, its structure and populating it with the results.

Using any text editor such as gedit or vi for coding, First lets indicate what linux interpreter should run our script, for our script we will use shell interpreter.

The code structure for our program is as follow:

 #!/bin/sh

As indicated the results will go to an HTML file, we first remove any pingresult.html file that may be there by:

rm pingresult.html

We recreate pingresult.html and add the opening HTML tag by using redirection, that is sending the results of the command to a file, you redirect by ">> pingresult.html" after the command.

echo '<html>' >> pingresult.html

Now we format the heading of the report and the date that will be added later on, by centering and using heading 1 style.

echo '<center> <h1>' >> pingresult.html

Then the heading of the server we are pinging is added below, here we pinging Google.

echo 'Google Ping Results</br>' >> pingresult.html

Now lets add the date to script and make it italic in addition to the heading 1 style.

	echo '<italic>' >> pingresult.html 
	date >> pingresult.html

The text formating closing tags:

	echo '</italic>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</h1> </center>' >> pingresult.html

We will ping the server 3 times, in linux you have to control the ping iteration as it it does not terminate automatically. We use the ping flag -c for count and 1 to indicate a single ping attempt, the results will be also be written to the pingresult.html

	
        ping -c 1 www.google.com >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html 
	ping -c 1 www.google.com >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html 
	ping -c 1 www.google.com >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html
	echo '</html>' >> pingresult.html

Save the file with .sh extension, give it executable rights and run it on any linux box.

Figure1. The ping results on a browser.

The complete script is as follow:

        #!/bin/sh
	rm pingresult.html
	echo '<html>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo '<center> <h1>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo 'Google Ping Results </br>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo '<italic>' >> pingresult.html 
	date >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</italic>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</h1> </center>' >> pingresult.html 
	ping -c 1 www.google.com >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html 
	ping -c 1 www.google.com >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html 
	ping -c 1 www.google.com >> pingresult.html 
	echo '</br>' >> pingresult.html
	echo '</html>' >> pingresult.html

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Simple Network Ping Tool with Shell and HTML

In this article we will create a simple shell script to allow you to ping the network nodes and store the results as html file for printing, storage and proof.