On another note, why not go ahead and just add
Net::Ping to your script so it will have the functionality instead of requiring you to pipe in output from ping?
use Net::Ping;
my $ping = new Net::Ping ("icmp");
my $PING_TIMEOUT = 2;
my $IP=$_;
if ($ping->ping($IP, $PING_TIMEOUT))
{
print "Ping Succeeded \n";
}
else { print "Ping failed\n";}
$ping->close();
Then you can just run your script with your IP as an argument...this would even make it easy to automate automate the script to run a list of IP's on a regular basis.