prettyping is a wrapper around the standard ping tool with the objective of
making the output prettier, more colorful, more compact, and easier to read.
prettyping runs the standard ping in the background and parses its output,
showing the ping responses in a graphical way at the terminal (by using
colors and Unicode characters).
prettyping is written in bash and awk, and is reported to work on many
different systems (Linux, Mac OS X, BSD…), as well as running on different
versions of awk (gawk, mawk, nawk, busybox awk).
prettyping was originally written in January of 2008, while I was working at Vialink. I noticed that, very often, we were looking at the output of the ping tool to measure the quality of network links, by looking at a combination of packet loss ratio and latency. However, the standard ping output is too verbose, making it hard to have a quick glance at latency. Not just that, but missing/lost packets are not reported at all. Finally, the statistics of the run are only printed at the very end, after ping finishes running. This helpful piece of information should be available all the time.
I observed a common use-case, a common pattern in our daily work, and I noticed that our workflow could have been improved by having better tools. And so I built a better tool. (By the way, this paragraph describes something I do ALL the time.)
Thus prettyping was born.
Read about the history of this project, as well as detailed information, screenshots, videos at: http://denilsonsa.github.io/prettyping/
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