Your example is kind of what we are doing (although ping takes an age to fail for a non existent ip address - even with timeout options wound down) we are just substituting nbtstat, which fails quicker if ip not present, and also gives us some extra information.

What I am thinking of is womething that would scan a range of ip addresses quickly - I have a gui product called wspingpro (from ipswitch) which does it, but I want a command line product. I have seen various subnet scanners used for simulating hackers - but I dont want to go near that sort of arena.

For instance a NBTSTAT -A for an address that is not active takes 13 seconds - to scan 10 subnets with one or two active ip addresses in each subnet would take about 9 hours. Something like WSPINGPR would take about 5 minutes.

Mark