acci-ping

acci-ping is an in terminal ping CLI utility.

Documentation

acci-ping can run be with no arguments to start the graphing ping accumulator. To exit simply kill the program via the normal control-c.

Arguments

• -file [file] the file to write the pings into. (default data not saved)
• -hide-help if this flag is used the help box will be hidden by default
• -pings-per-minute float sets the speed at which the program will try to get new ping results, 0 represents no limit. Negative values are an error. (default 60)
• -url [url] the url to target for ping testing (default www.google.com)
• -theme string the colour theme (either a path or builtin theme name) to use for the program, if empty this will try to get the background colour of the terminal and pick the built in dark or light theme based on the colour found.
  See the docs LINK HERE for how to create custom themes.

🐛 Debug Arguments

• -debug-log [file] write logs to file. (default no logs written)
• -debug-error-creator binds the [e] key to create errors for GUI verification
• -debug-strict enables more strict operation in which warnings turn into crashes.
• -debug-term-size disables raw mode and greatly simplifies terminal integration by forcing a fixed size, not recommended for use at all.
• -debug-cpuprofile [file] write cpu profile to file
• -debug-memprofile [file] write memory profile to file

Sub commands

acci-ping comes with some extra subcommands for help with the .pings file type. Since .pings is a binary serialisation format to keep file sizes low (70,000 packets only requires 33~ bytes on average to store which is over half compared to CSV) as well as storing some extra meta data.

• acci-ping drawframe [file|folder] will draw a single frame of the graph for a given .pings file, e.g you can use the test data in this repo to give it a try:
• acci-ping rawdata -all [file] [file...] will print the statistics and all raw packets found in a .pings file to stdout. Can also print a CSV format with -csv instead of -all. Provides a summary with no flags.

  $ acci-ping rawdata ./graph/data/testdata/input/medium-minute-gaps.pings
  BEGIN www.google.com: 03 Aug 2024 00:41:06.65 -> 01:02:28.1 (21m21.449886808s) | Average μ 8.167942ms | SD σ 80.4µs | Packet Count 67
  0: 216.58.201.100 | 2024-08-03T00:41:06.657+01:00 | 7.943379ms
  1: 216.58.201.100 | 2024-08-03T00:41:07.658+01:00 | 8.154265ms
  2: 216.58.201.100 | 2024-08-03T00:41:08.657+01:00 | 8.194011ms
  ...
  64: 172.217.16.228 | 2024-08-03T01:02:26.106+01:00 | 7.949701ms
  65: 172.217.16.228 | 2024-08-03T01:02:27.106+01:00 | 8.274327ms
  66: 172.217.16.228 | 2024-08-03T01:02:28.106+01:00 | 8.278227ms
  END www.google.com: 03 Aug 2024 00:41:06.65 -> 01:02:28.1 (21m21.449886808s) | Average μ 8.167942ms | SD σ 80.4µs | Packet Count 67

• acci-ping ping will run like any other ping command line tool and print the plain text packet statistics to stdout.

  $ acci-ping ping
  Pinging to "www.google.com" (4 times) at "142.250.179.228"
  142.250.179.228 | 2025-03-15T15:32:38.671980225Z | 8.689457ms
  142.250.179.228 | 2025-03-15T15:32:40.005615532Z | 8.874891ms
  142.250.179.228 | 2025-03-15T15:32:41.337992341Z | 8.831399ms
  142.250.179.228 | 2025-03-15T15:32:42.671321452Z | 8.817724ms
  

• acci-ping version will print the version of acci-ping, please include this if you have any issues.

All of these sub commands have their specific command line flags which can be shown with -h or -help.

Installation

Download the latest and greatest pre-built binaries from here https://github.com/Lexer747/acci-ping/releases and then add them to your PATH, probably renaming the binary to just acci-ping and then you're ready to go!

Or use:

go install github.com/Lexer747/acci-ping@v1.0.3

To build and install locally via the go install toolchain

🪟 Windows

This should just work! Download the binaries from https://github.com/Lexer747/acci-ping/releases

TODO adding releases to winget, etc

🍎 Mac/Apple

This should also just work! Download the binaries from https://github.com/Lexer747/acci-ping/releases

Tested on an M1 arm mac.

TODO add package to brew, etc

🐧 Linux

On linux to ensure that you do not get prompted for root permissions to execute the binary, simply run this command to allow IPv4 sockets to be opened by un-privileged binaries.

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ping_group_range="0 2147483647"

Note: you can use this command to undo this behaviour

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ping_group_range="1 0"

About

This binary relies on golang.org/x/net/icmp and the stdlib net in order to open raw sockets and communicate directly in the "echo" format. Since this protocol relies on reading all traffic coming into the computer it is a security risk to allow any binary to do this communication without being granted explicitly higher permissions. Hence to run this program you may need to follow the OS specific guidance in order to allow this program to run.

This package is also a "no third party" dependency project where other than the go standard library (and /x/ packages) no other dependencies are used, this is more for the challenge than any other reason. And there's an exception for unit tests as I plan to try some rapid-quick check tests in future.