Ping a list of host names and output the results to a csv in powershell

Question

I have a large list of hostnames I need to ping to see if they are up or down. I'm not really that great at scripting but I managed to figure this much out:

$names = Get-content "hnames.txt"

foreach ($name in $names){
  if (Test-Connection -ComputerName $name -Count 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue){
    Write-Host "$name is up" -ForegroundColor Green
  }
  else{
    Write-Host "$name is down" -ForegroundColor Red
  }
}

This gets me what I need but i now need to write out these results to a csv file and i have no idea how to do that.

Please Help!

Answer 1

You can use the following code instead (I simply altered the write-host calls to CSV formatting) and execute it with "PowerShell.exe script.ps > output.csv" Note that you must execute it from the folder that contains hnames.txt, or simply change the "hnames.txt" to a full path.

$names = Get-content "hnames.txt"

foreach ($name in $names){
  if (Test-Connection -ComputerName $name -Count 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue){
    Write-Host "$name,up"
  }
  else{
    Write-Host "$name,down"
  }
}

PS You can also use the Out-File Cmdlet to create the CSV file

Answer 2

I am a complete newbie to Powershell, so I took this on as a learning task, as I needed a quick and simple way to check a list of PC's for up/down status. These tweaks were needed to get it to output cleanly to the screen and to a txt file

$Output= @()
$names = Get-content "hnames.txt"
foreach ($name in $names){
  if (Test-Connection -ComputerName $name -Count 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue){
   $Output+= "$name,up"
   Write-Host "$Name,up"
  }
  else{
    $Output+= "$name,down"
    Write-Host "$Name,down"
  }
}
$Output | Out-file "C:\support\result.csv"

Answer 3

    $Output= @()
    $names = Get-Content ".\input\Servers.txt"
    foreach ($name in $names){
      if (Test-Connection -Delay 15 -ComputerName $name -Count 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -quiet){
       $Output+= "$name,up"
       Write-Host "$Name,up" -ForegroundColor Green
      }
      else{
        $Output+= "$name,down"
        Write-Host "$Name,down" -ForegroundColor Red
      }
    }
    $Output | Out-file ".\output\result.csv"

This is a tad cleaner, and includes the original foreground options but, BTW, the 'delay' switch seems to be ignored -PB

Answer 4

I would do it this way. Using a list of computers and -asjob works very well. The Responsetime property (confusingly the header is "Time(ms)") will be non-null if the host is up.

$names = Get-content hnames.txt
test-connection $names -asjob -count 1 | receive-job -wait -auto

Source        Destination     IPV4Address      IPV6Address     Bytes    Time(ms)
------        -----------     -----------      -----------     -----    --------
COMP001       yahoo.com       74.6.231.21                      32       39
COMP001       microsoft.com   40.113.200.201                   32