Meet uping: pronounced 'micro ping'

I use ping a lot, but milliseconds can hide the detail I care about. That's where uping comes in. It's a small C tool for macOS and Linux that measures ICMP round-trip time in microseconds, with colour-coded output you can read at a glance.

Under the hood, uping uses clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) for accurate timing and reports whole microseconds. It prefers raw sockets for the best signal, then falls back to datagram sockets if you do not have the right privileges. In plain terms: it aims for accuracy first, but it still works when your permissions are limited.

If you like seeing how simple the loop is, this is the mental model:

while keep_running:
    sent_at = monotonic_time_us()
    send_icmp_echo(target)
    reply = wait_for_reply(timeout_seconds=2)
    if reply:
        rtt_us = monotonic_time_us() - sent_at
        print_latency(rtt_us)
    else:
        print_timeout()
    sleep(interval_seconds=1)

Getting started is as small as the tool itself:

make
./uping 1.1.1.1
./uping -c 10 -i 0.5 google.com
./uping -W 1 -6 ipv6.google.com

Install is one command (sudo make install), with a small platform note. On Linux, setcap can let you run it without sudo. On macOS, if you want raw-socket accuracy without sudo, you can use the same setuid-root pattern as system ping.

If you want a faster lens on latency and jitter, give it a go: github.com/simonpainter/uping.