Hi,

when I use a Cisco router to ping, one single character is printed per
packet: "." for a correct reply, "!" for unreachable, and there are
other characters for problems with the packet. I'd love to see an
option to have ping -A behave like this - it is much easier to see if
a line is clean with that output format.

Greetings
Marc

Well, you can actually get similar behavior using the -f flag.  The only
aspect of the behavior that you may not like is that a 'backspace' is
printed for each successful round trip, but it's pretty close to what
you're looking for and gives a good, terse description of the network
conditions.

Note that in current versions of ping, -f is not incompatible with -i or
-A, nor does it strictly require superuser privilages.  Read the docs
for a better description of this behavior.

Is this close enough to what you're looking for that I can close this
bug?

noah

Yes, and no. The cisco output is easier to cut-and-paste, and it is
easier to convince cisco-people that their equipment is at fault if
one's debugging output resembles theirs.

It's your package, and your decision to close this bug. I suspect that
(enough C knowledge permitting, which I don't have) the desired
behavior can be achieved with at most an hour of work, but I can also
understand if there is no motivation upstream to implement this.

Greetings
Marc