Talk:Ping (networking utility)/Archive 3

move (rename) the article to the lowercase lettered ping (networking utility)
Is there any support here to rename the article to ping (networking utility) from the current Ping (networking utility) ? I see that WikiMedia software can now support a lowercase first letter article name (see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone ) - Bevo (talk) 20:27, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Hello! If the article title were "Ping (command-line utility)", I'd support the lowercasing.  Otherwise, capitalized title makes more sense because it refers to a type of network utility, not to a specific command-line utility. &mdash; Dsimic (talk &#124; contribs) 21:02, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a manual for Linux but a generic source of information
For this reason, we cannot have examples that just serve some of the users and confuse others.

Given the fact that the ping source has been forked by various people immediately after the initial source was published in December 1983, the only option that is common to all forks is -d and Linux is not even compatible to the original source as it does not allow to specify the packet size after the hostname.

If we include an example for ping, we thus need to warn about the nonportability of any possible example (SVr4 descendants like Solaris e.g. need -s to enable more than one ping packet. As long as one user denies (as done recently) to have this expressed in the article, it seems to be better to avoid any example. Schily (talk) 10:43, 10 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Hello! Well, how many people/readers use Linux, and how many use Solaris?  We should have that in mind while deciding what could or should be confusing.  What would be your wording proposal for the additional clarification? &mdash; Dsimic (talk | contribs) 10:52, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Okay, so this is kind of a silly thing to fight about. I've removed the -c option, and clarified that the sample is from Linux. Anyone still unhappy? Sneftel (talk) 11:03, 10 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Some people seem to be interested in fight rather than helpful articles.
 * @Dsimic: many examples on wikipedia are based on non-standard CLI variants that only work on Linux even though Linux would support the standardized options as well. I try to fix this whenever I get aware of such a problem. Ping is a special case as there is absolutely no common way to use the various forks, even though these forks have all been derived from the same source. Schily (talk) 11:26, 10 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Please don't get me wrong,, but if there are any Wikipedia editors interested in "fighting" as you've called it, based on your talk page posts so far I'd say that one of those would be you. &mdash; Dsimic (talk &#124; contribs) 13:08, 26 June 2015 (UTC)


 * If you answer after a so long time, I would expect you to first take the time to inform yourself about what happened in the past before drawing quick and false conclusions. Schily (talk) 10:00, 29 June 2015 (UTC)


 * What is that I should be especially aware of? &mdash; Dsimic (talk &#124; contribs) 12:20, 29 June 2015 (UTC)


 * If you point to my talk page, you should carefully read it instead of just taking a coarse view. There are some people in WP that are very active in trying to plant their wrong view on things into WP. Some of these people even spend a long time just for getting a so called source for their false claims. These people all seem to be UNIX newcomers that don't know what we oldtimers know since ages. Conclusion: be careful with impressions from a coarse view on things. Schily (talk) 15:18, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

The subject of this talk section was resolved three months ago, to (as far as I can tell) everyone's reasonable satisfaction. If you guys want to continue this meta-discussion, might I suggest you do so in user_talk? Sneftel (talk) 18:57, 29 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm fine with the way it has been resolved. &mdash; Dsimic (talk &#124; contribs) 05:38, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Is the sample in question really from Linux? It looks like it's from BSD to me. My Linux boxen format the times differently, output a total time on the second-to-last line and start the last line with "rtt" instead of "round trip". Since it shouldn't be important which system produced the output, I'm removing "under Linux". Groogle (talk) 01:42, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

I think there are good arguments both for and against this example, as well as pointing out which operating system the example is for. However, given that readers are most likely to use either Windows (which is quite different from the example) or Mac/Linux/BSD (mostly compatible, and very similar to the example), I think its worth noting what OS the example is from. TmuSrnn (talk) 21:08, 3 Jan 2016 (UTC)

Early UseNet By Mike Muuss Re: Ping
This is an interesting post from 1987 by Mike Muuss discussing ping in mod.protocols.tcp-ip :

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mod.protocols.tcp-ip/ymOM7LmzEsU/JGur6cVlelMJ

I am sure there are earlier ones discussing its usage origin and history, this is just one that stood out by the original author. And he gives credit to the other 'giants' at BBN.

Family Guy Guy (talk) 14:01, 26 April 2017 (UTC)