How can I ping a range of addresses starting with A and ending with B?

1

4 Answers

You could use a for loop to ping each IP address one at a time, but this is incredibly slow.

for /l %i in (1,1,255) do ping -n 1 192.168.0.%i | find /i "Reply"

• See: FOR /L

Here is how to do it with a 100ms timeout and neater output:

FOR /L %i IN (1,1,254) DO @ping -n 1 -w 100 192.168.1.%i | FIND /i "TTL"

2

To speed up the admittedly slow answer above, and assuming the node you seek is on the lan or a fast wan, add a timeout to the ping (20 milliseconds here):

for /l %i in (1,1,255) do ping -w 20 -n 1 192.168.0.%i | find /i "Reply"

This is useful if you don't have a proper utility and you don't have a port or want to do a broad port scan, or if the client isn't listening on any port.

Lets better understand this command and how it actually works. The command

for /l %i in (1,1,255) do ping -n 1 192.168.0.%i | find /i "Reply"

says to: Do a loop of pings from 1, counting up 1 each time, until you reach 255, while waiting for only 1 response on the specified network of 192.168.0.XXX.

To specify From A to B is in the (1,1,255) part of the command. As (x,y,z) x represents your A value (or starting point for your range), y represents the count up amount to find the next value to attempt, and z represents the B value (or maximum end of your range).

Very useful command and what I do is I break up the command into 3 ranges, opening up 3 command prompts, and running all 3 ranges simultaneously to speed up the process, and to help with readability. Readability is why I ultimately started using 3 ranges, because running the full range command will yield results yes, but scrolling back up only goes back so far, making it only useful in short ranges.

Range 1-80:

for /l %i in (1,1,80) do ping -n 1 192.168.0.%i | find /i "Reply" 

Range 81-165:

for /l %i in (81,1,165) do ping -n 1 192.168.0.%i | find /i "Reply"

Range 166 to 255:

for /l %i in (166,1,255) do ping -n 1 192.168.0.%i | find /i "Reply"

Good Luck and Enjoy!

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