Q&D Ping Function for Powershell

By default, Powershell does not have any built in functionality to send an ICMP ping to see if a remote computer is alive on and on the network. But never fear because Powershell is based off .NET. This means it is very easy to implement a Ping function that you can add to a Powershell library file (along with other functions that I have blogged about previously). The function is pretty straight forward. All that you really new to do is to create two .NET objects – Ping and PingReply. My ping function only looks to see if a success was returned by ICMP. I am not looking for round trip time or to handle non-successful.

function Ping (  [string] $strComputer )
{
  $timeout=120;
  trap { continue; }
  
  $ping = new-object System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping 
  $reply = new-object System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingReply

  $reply = $ping.Send($strComputer, $timeout);
  if( $reply.Status -eq "Success"  ) 
  {
     return $true;
  }
  return $false;

}

Again that’s it. The trap command will just ignore any errors that are throw by the $ping.Send command. If anyone has questions than you can always email me at brian@bjd145.org.