use Net::Ping;
my $ping = new Net::Ping ("icmp");
my $PING_TIMEOUT = 2;
my $IP=$_;
     if ($ping->ping($IP, $PING_TIMEOUT))
        {
                print "Ping Succeeded \n";
        }
        else { print "Ping failed\n";}
$ping->close();
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Then you can just run your script with your IP as an argument...this would even make it easy to automate automate the script to run a list of IP's on a regular basis.