How to ping MAC address in Linux

Question

I want to ping a known MAC address, I tried to use nmap:

sudo nmap -sP 192.168.15.1/24 | grep  20:64:32:3F:B1:A9

But in this case its ping all the 255 IP address (from 192.168.15.1 to 192.168.15.255) until get my MAC address, and that take a long time about 4 sec.!

any idea please?

Answer 1

The only way to make it faster is to test if the mac address is already into your arp table

#!/bin/bash

# extract ip from local arp table
ip=$(arp | grep 20:64:32:3F:B1:A9 | awk ' { print $1 } ')

# found an ip tied to the mac address?
if [ ! -z $ip ]; then

    # if found, do you want to ping it?
    ping $ip
else
    echo "Not found into local arp table. Trying another way..."

    # wanna try your nmap strategy?
    # sudo nmap -sP 192.168.15.1/24 | grep  20:64:32:3F:B1:A9
fi;