Batch ERRORLEVEL ping response

Question

I'm trying to use a batch file to confirm a network connection using ping. I want to do batch run and then print if the ping was successful or not. The problem is that it always displays 'failure' when run as a batch. Here is the code:

@echo off
cls
ping racer | find "Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),"
if not errorlevel 1 set error=success
if errorlevel 1 set error=failure
cls
echo Result: %error%
pause

'racer' is the name of my computer. I'm having my computer ping itself so I can eliminate the variable of a poor connection. As I said before, the batch always results in failure. Oddly enough, the program works fine if I copy the code into the command prompt. Does anyone know why the program works fine in the command prompt but doesn't work as a batch? Thanks

Solution 1

I 'm not exactly sure what the interaction between FIND and setting the error level is, but you can do this quite easily:

@echo off
for /f %%i in ('ping racer ^| find /c "(0%% loss)"') do SET MATCHES=%%i
echo %MATCHES%

This prints 0 if the ping failed, 1 if it succeeded. I made it look for just "0% loss" (not specifically 4 pings) so that the number of pings can be customized.

The percent sign has been doubled so that it's not mistaken for a variable that should be substituted.

The FOR trick serves simply to set the output of a command as the value of an environment variable.

Solution 2

A more reliable ping error checking method:

@echo off
set "host=192.168.1.1"

ping -n 1 "%host%" | findstr /r /c:"[0-9] *ms"

if %errorlevel% == 0 (
    echo Success.
) else (
    echo FAILURE.
)

This works by checking whether a string such as 69 ms or 314ms is printed by ping.

(Translated versions of Windows may print 42 ms (with the space), hence we check for that.)

Reason:

Other proposals, such as matching time= or TTL are not as reliable, because pinging IPv6 addresses doesn't show TTL (at least not on my Windows 7 machine) and translated versions of Windows may show a translated version of the string time=. Also, not only may time= be translated, but sometimes it may be time< rather than time=, as in the case of time<1ms.

Solution 3

If you were to

echo "Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),"

you would see the % is stripped. You need to escape it as % has a special meaning within a batch file:

"Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0%% loss),"

However its simpler to use TTL as the indication of success;

.. | find "TTL"

Solution 4

Testing for 0% loss may give a false positive, in this scenario: Let's say you normally have a network drive on some_IP-address, and you want to find out whether or not it's on.

If that drive is off, and you ping some_IP-address, the IP address from which you ping, will respond:
Answer from your_own_IP-address: target host not reachable
... 0% loss

You might be better off using if exist or if not exist on that network location.

Solution 5

Another variation without using any variable

ping racer -n 1 -w 100>nul || goto :pingerror
...

:pingerror
echo Host down
goto eof

:eof
exit /b

View more solutions

Comments

[LastStar007]

I saw something about using "TTL" on another post, but wanted to avoid it because someone said it can return a false positive.

[LastStar007]

Thanks for your help! [This] (stackoverflow.com/questions/3050898/…) link was where I started this project, and its example used FIND.

[l0ft13]

problem with this is the errorlevel is only set to 1 if the host is unknown - if you ping an ip address which doesn't respond it still returns 0

[Stephan]

OP intended to implement a sort of connection quality test - therefore a ping with several answers and checking for 0% loss. net viewwon't do that.

[jdw]

Agree. Here's the situation described further: C:\>ping -n 1 172.25.0.1 Pinging 172.25.0.1 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 172.25.1.1: Destination host unreachable. Ping statistics for 172.25.0.1: Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss), C:\>echo %errorlevel% 0

[littleguga]

ms is also translated in other languages(e.g. Russian).

[David Glickman]

Please provide more information when you give an answer. See How to Answer

[jacktrader]

Very neat method, I've seen a lot of batch but have never seen that. However, I'd modify it to be more like 'ping 198.168.57.98 -n 1 > nul 2>&1 && echo Success || echo failed'. Kudos

[moteus]

It may not works. e.g. I got %0 loss when get response like Host unreachable

[Stephan]

Note: this is language dependent (my ping says Anwort von ...) Also it only works with IP-Addresses, not with hostnames (as requested by the question).

[Stephan]

does not (try to) answer the question.

[BuvinJ]

Hmm. "ms" worked on French Windows. It would be great if anyone could look into, and post, the specifics of this, notably on which languages "ms" would fail on.