-q does not always quiet (Debian #661195)

[xtaran]

Initially reported at http://bugs.debian.org/661195 by Heiko Schlittermann hs@schlittermann.de:

According to the man page, "-q" should suppress the output. It seems to work if not combined with "-c", but if I use "-c" the result looks as follows:

$ fping -c1 -q 8.8.8.8
8.8.8.8 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 0/0/0%

I could reproduce this issue with 3.1rc1

[schweikert]

I think that the code is correct and the documentation is misleading. -q suppresses the output for each probe. If you use -c4, you would see 4 lines for each host. With -q, you only see the final statistics per host, which is the sole output. Removing even that output doesn't make much sense: you can always redirect to /dev/null, if you want to ping, but are not interested in the results.

[xtaran]

Hi David,

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 02:38:46PM -0700, David Schweikert wrote:

I think that the code is correct and the documentation is
misleading. -q suppresses the output for each probe. If you use -c4,
you would see 4 lines for each host. With -q, you only see the final
statistics per host, which is the sole output.

... which is not the case if the pinged hosts are in the same LAN and
therefore that's the bug:

$ fping -q -c4 kiva1 kiva2 kiva3 kiva4 kiva5 kiva6 kiva7
ICMP Host Unreachable from 192.33.99.16 for ICMP Echo sent to kiva7 (192.33.99.17)
ICMP Host Unreachable from 192.33.99.16 for ICMP Echo sent to kiva7 (192.33.99.17)
ICMP Host Unreachable from 192.33.99.16 for ICMP Echo sent to kiva7 (192.33.99.17)
kiva1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/4/0%, min/avg/max = 0.21/0.36/0.82
kiva2 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/4/0%, min/avg/max = 0.35/0.39/0.45
kiva3 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/4/0%, min/avg/max = 0.12/0.14/0.17
kiva4 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/4/0%, min/avg/max = 0.14/0.20/0.34
kiva5 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/4/0%, min/avg/max = 0.14/0.15/0.19
kiva6 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/4/0%, min/avg/max = 0.04/0.04/0.07
kiva7 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 4/0/100%

The issue are the "ICMP Host Unreachable" lines, not the
"xmt/rcv/%loss" lines. The "ICMP Host Unreachable" lines should not
happen with -q.

So please suppress all "ICMP Host Unreachable" lines if -q is given.

    Regards, Axel

[schweikert]

The ICMP Host Unreachable lines are a separate issue, which was recently fixed (#1)

[TeamBuyAtkinson]

This issue still exists for fedora. Please investigate.