How to check the status of ping in python

Question

I am working on python project where I need to ping an ip address to check if it online or offline. For this I have referred to most of the questions and answers online. Below is what I have tried first:

response = os.system("ping -c 1 " + ip_address)

if response == 0:
    print("Online")
else:
    print("Offline")

Above approach works fine but if we have Reply from <ip>. Destination host unreachable Reply from <ip>. Destination host unreachable , then also it says Online when in actual it should be Offline .

Another solution I tried is checking the output of ping command:

cmd = "ping -c 1 " + ip_address
res = (subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell=True))
res = res.decode("utf-8")
if 'unreachable' in res or 'timed out' in res or '100% packet loss' in res:
    print("Offline")
else:
    print("Online")

In this approach I am checking if the response contains unreachable or timed out or 100% packet loss (only in case of linux), then I am saying that its Offline or else Online . This solution works well in all cases but sometime it throws error Command 'ping -c 1 <ip>' returned non-zero exit status 1.

I also need to make sure that code I am writing should work both on Windows and Ubuntu .

I am not able to understand on what is the cleanest and simplest way of checking the response of ping and deciding if Online or Offline . Can anyone please help me. Thanks

Answer 1

Check out the scapy python library.

The first example here would give you some insights on how to solve the ping problem.