How it works...

The fping tool performs ICMP discovery in the same manner as other tools that we discussed earlier. For each IP address, fping transmits one or more ICMP echo requests, and the received responses are then evaluated to identify live hosts. fping can also be used to scan a range of systems or an input list of IP addresses by supplying the appropriate arguments. As such, we do not have to manipulate the tool with bash scripting in the same way that was done with ping to make it an effective scanning tool.