netselect is an ultrafast intelligent parallelizing binary-search implementation of "ping." netselect determines several facts about all of the hosts given on the command line, much faster than you would if you tried to use ping and traceroute. For example, if I type: netselect -v ftp.fceia.unr.edu.ar \ ftp.kulnet.kuleuven.ac.be \ ftp.cdrom.com ftp.debian.org \ ftp.de.debian.org It tells me statistics about each of the hostnames I provided, in much less time than doing a whole bunch of traceroutes.