Ping in Mac OS

Using the ‘ping’ command is very similar to using ‘ping’ in Linux as both the operating system uses the same shell – ‘zsh’. Some Linux distros may use the bash shell. However they only have minor changes between them.

1. Opening the terminal

To open the terminal in Mac OS, type ‘terminal’ in the search box at the top of the desktop.

Now, click on the terminal icon to open a new terminal.

2. Finding help

Just like Linux, you can use the ‘man’ command to check out the manual pages of ‘ping’ command in Mac OS. In case, man pages are not found in your Mac terminal, don’t panic. You have another simple way to find help – The good old ‘–help‘ option.

ping --help

3. Executing ping

Executing the command is just the same executing it in Linux. Let’s specify the count using ‘-c’ option and ping the same domain name – ‘practice.w3wiki.org’.

ping -c 3 practice.w3wiki.org

The statistics of the ‘ping’ command will get printed on the terminal once the process has been completed. You can also interrupt the ping process and force it to terminate using the shortcut key ‘command + c‘.

Ping is a command line networking utility that uses ICMP packets to check if a logical route is available to communicate with a specific host. A failure of the ping command doesn’t necessarily mean that the host is down. There are many other possible reasons for the failure. Along with the primary purpose of ping, this command can also provide insights about some of the useful networking parameters, such as Round Trip Time (RTT). Ping is available by default in all three operating systems. So, usually, you don’t need any prerequisites for executing this command.

The term ‘ping‘, in computer terms, refers to sending a message to a host to check if the host is up (alive and running) or down (dead). For simplification, think of ping as a message that contains the question ‘Hey, are you there?’. This might sound simple, but it is one of the handy commands still used by network engineers to troubleshoot various network issues. In this article, we will learn how to ping a host using its IP address, from the top 3 operating systems – Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.