Terminal for macOS. The UNIX ping command lets you test network servers and latency. Here's how to use it in the macOS Terminal app. The UNIX ping command is a tiny UNIX network tool that allows you to test your network, that of your ISP or organization, remote servers, and network latency.
ping is one of the oldest and simplest UNIX commands and is available in virtually all UNIX distributions, including macOS. ping was written by the late Mike Muuss in 1983 at the US Army Defense Ballistics Lab. Sadly, Muuss died young in 2000 at the age of 42, in a car accident on Interstate 95 in Maryland.
Muuss was also the author of several 3D/CAD apps at the time, as well as the UNIX utility ttcp which measures network throughput using TCP and UDP protocols. Muuss' original technical web page is still available on one of the first fifty servers on the internet: a US Army FTP server for the Ballistics Lab.
The ping command works by using the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) - in particular by sending ECHO_REQUEST packets, and by utilizing its Time To Live (TTL), latency, and packet loss detection to measure round trip hops to a given internet-connected computer at either an IP address or domain name.
Don't confuse Time To Live with a different subject from electronics: Transistor-to-transistor Logic (also abbreviated 'TTL'). The name "ping" comes from submarine SONAR technology which detects underwater vessels by emitting sound waves, and then measuring the time it takes for echoes to return.
