Xjyuk

I'm aware of the methods where you can run a Bash for loop and ping multiple servers, is there a Linux CLI tool that I can use which will allow for me to do this without having to resort to writing a Bash script to ping a list of servers one at a time?

Something like this:

$ ping host1 host2 host3

NOTE: I'm looking specifically for CentOS/Fedora, but if it works on other distros that's fine too.

If you look into the NMAP project you'll find that it includes additional tools on top of just nmap. One of these tools is nping, which includes the following ability:

Nping has a very flexible and powerful command-line interface that
grants users full control over generated packets. Nping's features
include:

• Custom TCP, UDP, ICMP and ARP packet generation.


• Support for multiple target host specification.


• Support for multiple target port specification.


• ...

nping is in the standard EPEL repos to boot.

$ repoquery -qlf nmap.x86_64 | grep nping
/usr/bin/nping
/usr/share/man/man1/nping.1.gz

Usage

To ping multiple servers you merely have to tell nping the names/IPs and which protocol you want to use. Here since we want to mimic what the traditional ping CLI does we'll use ICMP.

$ sudo nping -c 2 --icmp scanme.nmap.org google.com

Starting Nping 0.7.70 ( https://nmap.org/nping ) at 2019-06-14 13:43 EDT
SENT (0.0088s) ICMP [10.3.144.95 > 45.33.32.156 Echo request (type=8/code=0) id=42074 seq=1] IP [ttl=64 id=57921 iplen=28 ]
RCVD (0.0950s) ICMP [45.33.32.156 > 10.3.144.95 Echo reply (type=0/code=0) id=42074 seq=1] IP [ttl=46 id=24195 iplen=28 ]
SENT (1.0091s) ICMP [10.3.144.95 > 45.33.32.156 Echo request (type=8/code=0) id=42074 seq=2] IP [ttl=64 id=57921 iplen=28 ]
SENT (2.0105s) ICMP [10.3.144.95 > 45.33.32.156 Echo request (type=8/code=0) id=42074 seq=2] IP [ttl=64 id=57921 iplen=28 ]
RCVD (2.0107s) ICMP [45.33.32.156 > 10.3.144.95 Echo reply (type=0/code=0) id=42074 seq=2] IP [ttl=46 id=24465 iplen=28 ]
SENT (3.0138s) ICMP [10.3.144.95 > 64.233.177.100 Echo request (type=8/code=0) id=49169 seq=2] IP [ttl=64 id=57921 iplen=28 ]

Statistics for host scanme.nmap.org (45.33.32.156):
 | Probes Sent: 2 | Rcvd: 2 | Lost: 0 (0.00%)
 |_ Max rtt: 86.053ms | Min rtt: 0.188ms | Avg rtt: 43.120ms
Statistics for host google.com (64.233.177.100):
 | Probes Sent: 2 | Rcvd: 0 | Lost: 2 (100.00%)
 |_ Max rtt: N/A | Min rtt: N/A | Avg rtt: N/A
Raw packets sent: 4 (112B) | Rcvd: 2 (108B) | Lost: 2 (50.00%)
Nping done: 2 IP addresses pinged in 3.01 seconds

The only drawback I've found with this tool is the use of ICMP mode requiring root privileges.

$ nping -c 2 --icmp scanme.nmap.org google.com
Mode ICMP requires root privileges.

fping is in a Fedora package of the same name, and allows for many hosts, or a set of ip addressses.

$ fping -a -A -c 1 hosta hostb
192.168.0.20 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 1/1/0%, min/avg/max = 0.64/0.64/0.64
192.168.1.3 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 1/1/0%, min/avg/max = 0.50/0.50/0.50

fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next target in a
round-robin fashion... if a target replies, it is noted and removed from
the list

I know it's specifically not what you are asking for, but a bash script to accomplish this:

#!/bin/bash

endpoints=("$@")

for i in "$endpoints[@]"; do
 ping -c5 "$i" 2>&1 | tail -3 &
 pids+=($!)
done

for pid in "$pids[@]"; do
 wait "$pid"
done

This will take your endpoints as command line arguments and send a 5 count ping to each one as a background process and then wait for all to finish before exiting. It will print the last three lines of the ping output which contains useful stats about the success rate and latency.

oping host1 host2 host3

Description:

oping uses ICMP packages (better known as "ping packets") to test the reachability of network hosts. It supports pinging multiple hosts in parallel using IPv4 and/or IPv6 transparently.

This package contains two command line applications: "oping" is a replacement for tools like ping(1), ping6(1) and fping(1). "noping" is an ncurses-based tool which displays statistics while pinging and highlights aberrant round-trip times.

Just for fun and profit...

#!/bin/sh -

hosts="
host.a
host.b
host.c
host.d
host.e
"

for p in $hosts
do
# ONLY CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING, NOT BOTH
# dump results to file
 ping $p >>./PINGED
# dump output to console
 ping $p
done

exit

This could be easily enhanced. Which makes it pretty useful. :)

HTH

I do not know what you want exactly but you could change the last 8 bit-set into the decimal 255, so your hosts will receive a broadcast, actually,it will transmit ping packets to all devices that exist in a network.

ping -c 1 xx.xx.xx.255