Ping is so mean 🥺

I got your IP adress, see you soon kiddo 😎

OP must be my neighbour
I'm already in the network... Wait...

Wait a second… That’s MY ip!

Wait ... the ping is coming from inside the house!
- Holy shit 😱 (unplugs everything from mains... waits in terror in a corner...)

Hahahahah you just doxed yourself hahahahah

Ahh yes get doxed through local ip XD
- Woooooosh

Wow, that is an unhelpful error message. It could have told you it was expecting a number. It turns out that -i is short for "interval" and expects a number, whereas -I is used to specify an interface.

This exactly. And because this is open-source, its super easy to track this down. I searched for the source of the error message:
https://github.com/iputils/iputils/blob/3400f3a740942064a545f02aabcf68e234733297/ping/ping.c#L237
see this is ping_strtod function - so search for that function name and the first hit is the '-i' case:

case 'i': { double optval; optval = ping_strtod(optarg, _("bad timing interval")); if (isless(optval, 0) || isgreater(optval, (double)INT_MAX / 1000)) error(2, 0, _("bad timing interval: %s"), optarg); rts.interval = (int)(optval * 1000); rts.opt_interval = 1; } break;

It’s actually a technical term in language theory – a term that cannot be produced by the language, but is still considered part of the ‘universe’ (i.e., the set of all terms) is called ‘garbage’ or ‘junk’.

Since I can’t find a source online to verify this claim, this might just have been the case in my courses…

"Invalid" or "unparseable" are more understandable descriptors in normal language. I don't think I ever heard of garbage/junk being used for that in language theory but it may be domain specific usage.

See, even ping hates "consistent device naming!"

Good old git blame lol! Not only can you determine when the change was made and where, it’s trivial to look up the author of the commit: https://github.com/iputils/iputils/commit/562e0d570d93cfcfdebab1215a2f04efa64a24f8

To be fair, the author’s first language may not be English…

Is anyone interested in submitting a pull request? Looks like Github contributions are accepted.

My dude. It's not a bug, OP just used small i instead of capital. Please don't bother developers over this.
- I think descriptive and useful error messages are OK to report as enhancements. They don’t have to be functional bugs.

-Me talking to people on twitter after nov 22 and before leaving

Same tbh.