It seems like someone who runs enough pings to warrant this kind of parsing would be better served writing a service which does nothing but ping stuff. Then they can use whatever encoding method they want rather than trying to retrofit such things onto existing tools which are for humans.<p>It seems people want to wrap things and parse them rather than making the same basic library calls themselves. Note the "inspiration" part of this post: the author started parsing the output of iwlist instead of just making the requisite calls directly.<p>Oh, and don't derail this with a discussion of suid-ness required for raw sockets (ping) or whatever magic ioctls that an iwlist-alike would require. This applies to other things which can run as a normal user, too.