README for prips

prips is a tool that can be used to print all of the IP address on a given range.  It
can enhance the usability of tools that are made to work on only one host at a time (e.g.
whois).

Installation:
-------------
At this time, prips has only been tested on Linux 2.x/i386.  It may or may not work on 
other platforms.  If you port it and feel like sending me a patch please do so!  I will be
very grateful.  

Use tar to extract the source code 'tar xvfz prips.tar.gz'. Enter the prips
directory and type 'make'.  That will create a binary call 'prips'.  Copy that wherever you
like (e.g. /usr/local/bin).

Examples:
---------

Example 1 and 2:
----------------
The following two examples illustrate the most basic use of prips.  The first example
prints all of the addresses between the start IP address (first argument) and end IP
address (second argument).  The second example uses CIDR notation to achieve the same
result.

	[dan@twig /]$ prips 192.168.0.0 192.168.0.255
	192.168.0.0
	192.168.0.1
	...
	192.168.0.255

Do the same with CIDR:

	[dan@twig /]$ prips 192.168/24
	192.168.0.0
	192.168.0.1
	...
	192.168.0.255

Example 3:
----------
We can also use prips to go from an IP range to CIDR notation by using the -c option.

	[dan@twig /]$ prips -c 192.168.0.0 192.168.0.15
	192.168.0.0/28

Example 4:
----------
The -i option allows us to set the number by which each address is incremented.  This
example uses the -i option to print only the network addresses of each class C size network
in the range 10.8/16.

	[dan@twig /]$ prips -i 256 10.8/16
	10.8.0.0
	10.8.1.0
	10.8.2.0
	...
	10.8.255.0

Example 5:
----------
The last example is a shell script that pings all of the hosts on a (small) network in
parallel.  A one or zero indicates whether the host can be pinged or not.  The -e
options is used in this example to exclude the network address and broadcast address (0
and 255 in the last octet).  Note that this script only works on small networks because it
uses a *lot* of processes.  There is a race in that if the pings don't return fast 
enough, you may hit your process limit...

	#!/bin/sh

	if [ $# != 0 ]; then
		ping -c 1 $1 >/dev/null
   		echo "$1: $?"              
	else
		for i in `prips 207.94.169/24 -e ...0,255`
		do
			exec $0 $i &
		done
	fi		

Feedback:
---------
Please send all feedback to dan@vertekcorp.com.  Suggestions, patches, and bug reports are
always appreciated.
