It is a sad day for computing when
- hackers can't read an RFC
- hackers don't know octal
- hackers can't trial-and-error an interesting behaviour until they see a pattern and learn for themselves.
- hackers can't read an RFC
- hackers don't know octal
- hackers can't trial-and-error an interesting behaviour until they see a pattern and learn for themselves.
That applies to the majority of 'knowledge' these days.
All one has to do is look at the source for ping and questions like these are answered.
However, the value of looking at ping is it let's you see a simple example of a lot of networking system calls which you can then dig into. I had a class project to write a simple web-server and text based browser in C and ping was actually a great place to start.