How to Install and Use tcpping for TCP‑Based Latency Measurements on Linux

Installing tcpping on Linux

tcpping is a shell‑script that sends TCP SYN packets and measures round‑trip time (RTT) using the TCP three‑way handshake. It requires tcptraceroute and bc as prerequisites.

Install prerequisites

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tcptraceroute bc

CentOS/RHEL:

sudo yum install tcptraceroute bc

Download and install tcpping

wget http://www.vdberg.org/~richard/tcpping
sudo cp tcpping /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/tcpping

Using tcpping

Basic syntax:

tcpping [-d] [-c] [-r sec] [-x count] ipaddress [port]

-d

: prepend a timestamp to each line. -c: column‑oriented output for easier parsing. -r: interval between probes in seconds (default 1). -x: repeat count times (default unlimited). port: destination TCP port (default 80).

Root privileges are required because the script invokes the privileged tcptraceroute binary.

Example – measuring RTT of a web server

tcpping www.rumenz.com
seq 0: tcp response from 42.194.162.109 (42.194.162.109) <syn,ack> 33.822 ms
seq 1: tcp response from 42.194.162.109 (42.194.162.109) <syn,ack> 33.975 ms
...

Additional utilities

To test whether a remote TCP port is open, you can use nc (netcat):

nc -vn <ip-address> <port-number>

Advanced options

-t

: continuous probing until interrupted (Ctrl+C). -n 5: stop after 5 probes. -w 0.5: set timeout to 0.5 seconds. -4: prefer IPv4 when both A and AAAA records exist. -6: prefer IPv6. --file: read a list of hosts (one per line, optional port) and probe each, e.g.

tcpping --file hosts.txt