Communication

When you work in a distributed environment then you need to communicate with remote users and you also need to access remote Unix machines.

There are several Unix utilities which are especially useful for users computing in a networked, distributed environment. This tutorial lists few of them:

The ping Utility:
The ping command sends an echo request to a host available on the network. Using this command you can check if your remote host is responding well or not.

The ping command is useful for the following:

Tracking and isolating hardware and software problems.

Determining the status of the network and various foreign hosts.

Testing, measuring, and managing networks.

Syntax:
Following is the simple syntax to use ping command:

$ping hostname or ip-address
Above command would start printing a response after every second. To come out of the command you can terminate it by pressing CNTRL + C keys.

Example:
Following is the example to check the availability of a host available on the network:

$ping google.com
PING google.com (74.125.67.100) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=39.4 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=39.9 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=39.3 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=39.1 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=38.8 ms
--- google.com ping statistics ---
22 packets transmitted, 22 received, 0% packet loss, time 21017ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 38.867/39.334/39.900/0.396 ms
$
If a host does not exist then it would behave something like this:

$ping giiiiiigle.com
ping: unknown host giiiiigle.com
$