Hi David! :-)

 DD> There may well be improvements to the script, it was written many 
 DD> years ago for a much earlier version of Linux. It has continued to 
 DD> work for me to this day and I've never seen need to update it (other 
 DD> than the ISP).
It depends a bit on your version of ping, yes. With the version here on my
box, your script fails, because a ping -c 4 does never terminate for me
when the other end is not reachable at all. Therefore I needed the -w 4 to
make it wait at most 4 seconds.

Ciao
Pascal

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