this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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    [–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago (1 children)

    Wow, that is an unhelpful error message. It could have told you it was expecting a number. It turns out that -i is short for "interval" and expects a number, whereas -I is used to specify an interface.

    [–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

    This exactly. And because this is open-source, its super easy to track this down. I searched for the source of the error message:

    https://github.com/iputils/iputils/blob/3400f3a740942064a545f02aabcf68e234733297/ping/ping.c#L237

    see this is ping_strtod function - so search for that function name and the first hit is the '-i' case:

    		case 'i':
    		{
    			double optval;
    
    			optval = ping_strtod(optarg, _("bad timing interval"));
    			if (isless(optval, 0) || isgreater(optval, (double)INT_MAX / 1000))
    				error(2, 0, _("bad timing interval: %s"), optarg);
    			rts.interval = (int)(optval * 1000);
    			rts.opt_interval = 1;
    		}
    			break;