With the help of Abhas Bhaiyya, I could write this shell script which checks if an ipaddress can be pinged.
#!/bin/sh
if [ `ping -c1 192.168.31.31 >/dev/null; echo $?` -eq 1 ]
then
echo “not able to ping”
fi
/dev/null is used here so that the output of the ping command is not compared with 1.
$? gives out the return code of the command.
