pingx 1.0

pingx is utility that uses the XNoOp(3x) call to see how fast your connection to your X server. Wonder whether your X performance is slower in a SSH tunnel? pingx can give you hard numbers so you can find out. It has an option to print out some details about the X server as well. Its also useful to see if a X server is up so you can fire up x2x or similar applications intelligently.
pingx is really nice for seeing if a remote display is up (use the options "-q -c 1"). It even returns immediately instead of waiting a second like the ICMP ping utility does, in case youre the impatient type.
Why would you need to know if a remote display is up? Well, I need to know because I have three monitors and two of them are on a dual-head machine. Im not sure whether the dual-head machine is running xinerama http://sourceforge.net/projects/xinerama/) or not this week, so Im unsure whether my center monitor is :0.1 or :0.0. This is important because I use x2vnc to control a third monitor over to the left, and if I give a bad DISPLAY variable to x2vnc it doesnt work.
Clueful people will probably point out that I should make :0.0 my left monitor and put a "Screen 1 RightOf Screen0" statement in my XF86Config-4, but I thought that writing an X protocol-level ping utility might be a fun thing to do instead.
It compiles under FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE and Linux ok. I got lazy and make different LDLIBS lines in the Makefile. Ill use autoconf/automake in the future, but just edit the Makefile for now.
Enhancements:
- initial release. Has count, verbose, and quiet flags. Needs to have statistics and a signal handler written. Needs to be autoconfed and automaked.