Hello, I am writing a script that is going to ping a remote host but I want the user to be able to enter in the interval and size when he runs the program. For example the user would enter this to initialize the script.

The code that I have running so far is:

ok so now for example my output is:

And then once the ping either times out or the user presses cntrl C you get

My question is how do I reference that number of packets transmitted and received so that I can calculate if they are equal or not. I know i would put those values into variables but what do I set each variable equal too?

Why do you want a user intervention in your script ??

Just a suggestiion, If you want to collect data over a certain interval of time then use the -w option to define the interval and that will remove the user intervention.

As far as your comparision of Tx and Rx packets is concerned, you can capture the ping statistics in a log file and then use 'awk' to get the Tx packet in one variable and Rx packets in one variable from the logfile and compare them as per your requirement.

Amit