I'm playing with some network stuff right now for a server. its all console right now, and it's also all Win32, so keep that in mind. One of the diagnostics i am working is a tool for pinging the active clients, and in a separate prog just as a test, you can feed it an ip range (which is working) and it will ping it, however what i want to know is if you can somehow capture the output from the ping command so i can display it inside my game. now, since ping runs at the command line i would think there would be a way. ping's output typically looks like this: Pinging <ip address> with 32 bytes of data: <ping time here or time out message> <ping time here or time out message> <ping time here or time out message> <ping time here or time out message> Ping Statistics for <same ip address here>: Packets: Sent = 4, Recieved = (varies based on results), Lost = (again varies) Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = (result), Maximum = (result), Average = (result) All i'm REALLY interested is that last little bit about the ping statistics, because it'd be nice when you're trying to get a game going (LAN or internet) and you can ping everyone from the server. Any help would be apprechiated.

The only way you can do it with system() that I can think of is to redirect the shell output to a file and read from that file. A much more elegant way to do that is to spawn a child process connected to the current process with a pipe. I know that in *nix you use popen() but I don't know how to do it on Windows. Maybe something like CreateProcess() or similar can help, but I'm too lazy to look it up myself. [grin]

Thanks guys, I figured i'd have to start another process but wasnt really sure. That MSDN link looks like exactly what i need. Maybe one day microsoft will organize their site so one can just say blatently what you want and actually get answers to what you want without getting 2 million specific issue results