Checking internet connectivity in Ubuntu

Question

This is perhaps a noob question. I want to check the status of my internet connection like we do in Windows with "ping 172.16.0.1 -t" where we know there's connection if we get a reply. Is there a similar command in Ubuntu. A google search wasn't really helpful in this case.

Solution

You can use ping from the terminal. It should be available by default. In Linux, your ping will continue to ping forever. You can use the -c flag to limit the number of pings:

• ping -c 1 172.16.0.1

After reading the Windows Docs for ping, I understand the -t flag is to make the ping keep pinging forever. As this is the default behavour of ping on Ubuntu, you would simply do the following:

• ping 172.16.0.1

Check man ping to read up on more options for ping.

Comments

[josh]

To use this command you have to open terminal via ctrl+alt+t