BASH threads

Hi all

Is it possible to create threads in BASH?
I need a script with will ping a network to find out unused IP. in a for or while loop the pinging process is taking a very long time. I was wondering if it is possible to send multiple ping on the same time so this will speed up the scanning process.

Thx in advanced

tried to run several ping commands to background with sign & at the end?

at the moment i'm experimenting with childs
- created a function runChild()witch is runs a ping command

ping -q -c2 $1|grep \"packet loss\"|cut -f4 -d \",\"|awk {'print $1'}|sed s/%//g

and an if statement to find out if the return of the command above is 100 or not.
Now i'm trying to start 254 childs so they can ping all 254 IP simultaneous. And here i'm a little stuck

This is what i have so far, but not working

#!/bin/bash
iNext=0
net=$1
function ChildReturned() {
        wait $1
        echo "$1 was returned. Its exits status was: $?"
        iNext=$((iNext+1))
        echo $net.$iNext
        read key
        StartChild $net.$iNext
}

function StartChild(){
        echo "ping -q -c2 $1|grep \"packet loss\"|cut -f4 -d \",\"|awk {'print $1'}|sed s/%//g" >/t
        IP=$1
        echo $1
        read key
        bash /tmp/alive.$$ $IP &
        pid=$!
        echo "Child started with PID= $pid"
        trap 'ChildReturned $pid' SIGCHLD
}

for (( iNext=0; iNext<=254; iNext++ ));
do
        echo $net.$iNext
        read key
        StartChild $net.$iNext
done

Well I do not have advice on the threading but I can get rid of several wasted arguments for you:

#yours
ping -q -c2 $1|grep \"packet loss\"|cut -f4 -d \",\"|awk {'print $1'}|sed s/%//g

#mine
ping -q -c2 $1 | sed -rn '/loss/s/.*([0-9]+)% packet.*/\1/p'

It's possible to use multiple processes (not threads) in bash, but in this case I would suggest

nmap -sP $net.0-254