G'day Leo,
"... there is probably a better way to do it."
There would be many ways to this.
The unqualified term "better" is highly subjective:
if it relates to efficiency, then Benchmark possible solutions;
if it relates to other criteria, you'll need to tell us about that or assess for yourself.
Here's one way you could do it:
$ perl -e '
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie ":all";
my @hosts = qw{8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4};
my $command = join ";", map "ping -c3 ".$_, @hosts;
my $result = qx{$command};
my $re = qr{(?s:^(\S+).+?(\S+)\s+ms\s*$)};
my $fmt = "%s min:%s avg:%s max:%s mdev:%s\n";
open my $mh, "<", \$result;
{
local $/ = "PING ";
while (<$mh>) {
chomp;
next unless /$re/;
printf $fmt, $1, split /\//, $2;
}
}
'
8.8.8.8 min:16.929 avg:17.290 max:17.585 mdev:0.272
8.8.4.4 min:15.392 avg:15.856 max:16.284 mdev:0.365
Notes:
-
Use of the strict and warnings pragmata. Highly recommended; compulsory in my opinion.
-
A more succinct method for creating the command.
-
Capturing the result as a single string which is subsequently processed by
Opening a filehandle into an in-memory scalar.
-
A simplified regex for use on an entire ping result.
The four (min/avg/max/mdev) values are captured as a single entity
and later split when the individual values are required.
-
A format for standardised report output; used later by printf.
-
Reading individual ping results by manipulating $/
(see "perlvar: Variables related to filehandles").
I've shown a number of different ways to do various things.
Pick and choose the bits you want; or, use as is, if you like all of it.