Hm, I'm not sure I like this being the new default. I guess Linux does it, but there are or used to be many networks where reverse DNS was totally broken (as in, silently dropped). It is nice that ping is mostly a test of IP (ICMP) and not the higher level UDP/TCP protocols DNS uses.

Is there a very short timeout on rDNS lookup failure or on broken networks will ping just hang for 30 seconds at a time?

In D21351#464706, @cem wrote:

Hm, I'm not sure I like this being the new default. I guess Linux does it, but there are or used to be many networks where reverse DNS was totally broken (as in, silently dropped). It is nice that ping is mostly a test of IP (ICMP) and not the higher level UDP/TCP protocols DNS uses.

Is there a very short timeout on rDNS lookup failure or on broken networks will ping just hang for 30 seconds at a time?

Personally, I could go either way for the default. What's most important IMHO is that ping and ping6 have the same default. Until now, they didn't.

In D21351#464707, @asomers wrote:

Personally, I could go either way for the default. What's most important IMHO is that ping and ping6 have the same default. Until now, they didn't.

I agree they should have the same default. But I think generally, where such defaults might conflict, the IPv4 version of the tool's default takes precedence. IPv4 is still the dominant protocol, as much as we'd all like that to change. The foo6 utilities are all secondary.

Maybe the title of this revision is not completely exact. The F_NUMERIC option flag has been cleared by default so it's more like ping was intended to do reverse lookups by default.

After reading opinions of both of you, I lean a bit more towards numeric only output being default. It will be done in the next diff.