Ip/ping is chatty, even with the -q flag set. My 
understanding of this flag is that it should stop all
output of ping from happening (that goes to stdout, as
opposed to stderr). In fact, ip/ping still outputs its
startup garble (sending bla bla) and, if it loses
packets, how many.

My expectation is that it should behave as e.g. grep -s
where no output happens to stdout, but the $status is
set.

This patch should fix this issue adequately (it's really
just 2 lines).

Reference: /n/sources/patch/applied/hushping
Date: Wed Apr  4 22:01:26 CES 2007

--- /sys/src/cmd/ip/ping.c	Wed Apr  4 21:58:11 2007
+++ /sys/src/cmd/ip/ping.c	Wed Apr  4 21:58:06 2007
@@ -362,7 +362,7 @@
 			lostmsgs++;
 	unlock(&listlock);
 
-	if(lostmsgs)
+	if(!quiet && lostmsgs)
 		print("%d out of %d messages lost\n", lostmsgs,
 			lostmsgs+rcvdmsgs);
 }
@@ -568,8 +568,9 @@
 		exits("dialing");
 	}
 
-	print("sending %d %d byte messages %d ms apart to %s\n",
-		nmsg, msglen, interval, ds);
+	if (!quiet)	
+		print("sending %d %d byte messages %d ms apart to %s\n",
+			nmsg, msglen, interval, ds);
 
 	switch(rfork(RFPROC|RFMEM|RFFDG)){
 	case -1: