Simple Internet Test

[ixium]

Not really sure where to put this, but I have an idea and no idea how to implement it.

 

At work, our internet goes out quite a bit, my wifi stays active and full, so I have to open a new window, type something random into google and see if it works to know if the net is down and if it needs to be restarted.

 

I could make a workflow that launches a google window and iinputs some random stuff, but can anyone think of a more elegant solution, a one word test that can be run through alfred and give me the result (connected or no connection) in alfred as well.

 

thank you so much!

[deanishe]

The shell command ping -o -t 2 google.com will succeed if it can connect to Google and fail if not (-t 2 means 2-second timeout, so you might need to increase that).
 
Here's a simple bash script:

ping -o -t 2 google.com
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    echo "Online"
else
    echo "Offline"
fi

 
 
Put that in a Run Script Action (Language = /bin/bash) and connect it to a Post Notification or Large Type Output.

[ixium]

thank you so much, I believe that worked perfectly and you taught me  some new stuff, like pushing to large type. Very cool. thank you so much!

[nikivi]

Can I ask a question regarding this workflow? I also find it quite insightful that something like this can be done. I tried to replicate it like so : 

 

 

this is what I wrote in the bash script : 

 

 

And this is the post notification : 

 

 

However I would assume that the post notification would only write me 'online' or 'offline' in the notification but instead it writes this :

 

 

I am not really certain what clarifies as a query here? Is it the echo part or everything in the script and how can I specify what goes in the notification pane. Thank you a lot for any help.

Edited June 14, 2016 by nikivi

[deanishe]

In the case of a Run Script Action, the {query} of the following element is whatever the script prints to STDOUT. In this case, ping's output + Online/Offline.
 
Post Notification treats {query} differently in each field. Title shows only the first line. Text shows more.
 
If you don't want to see the output of ping, use: ping -o -t 2 google.com > /dev/null

[nikivi]

Thank you. That makes sense now. Today I learned about /dev/null