It seems like someone who runs enough pings to warrant this kind of parsing would be better served writing a service which does nothing but ping stuff. Then th

It seems like someone who runs enough pings to warrant this kind of parsing would be better served writing a service which does nothing but ping stuff. Then they can use whatever encoding method they want rather than trying to retrofit such things onto existing tools which are for humans. It seems people want to wrap things and parse them rather than making the same basic library calls themselves. Note the "inspiration" part of this post: the author started parsing the output of iwlist instead of just making the requisite calls directly. Oh, and don't derail this with a discussion of suid-ness required for raw sockets (ping) or whatever magic ioctls that an iwlist-alike would require. This applies to other things which can run as a normal user, too.