Checking host availability by using ping in bash scripts

Question

I want to write a script, that would keep checking if any of the devices in network, that should be online all day long, are really online. I tried to use ping, but

Answer 1

There is advanced version of ping - "fping", which gives possibility to define the timeout in milliseconds.

#!/bin/bash
IP='192.168.1.1'
fping -c1 -t300 $IP 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
if [ "$?" = 0 ]
then
  echo "Host found"
else
  echo "Host not found"
fi