Inconsistent behavior: Ping.

[jmoriconi]

I'm hoping there are some 'ping' guru's out there (if such a guru exists) because i've a questoin that has been annoying me for days now. Google doesn't seem to hold the answer, nor do the network admins/developers where i work.

I made a network utility that pings several hundred addresses, some of which are fed to the utility with a leading zero. For instance:
10.11.01.253
10.27.08.253

Why oh why would linux change 10.11.01.253 to 10.11.1.253 but leave 10.27.08.253 as-is? I've worked around the problem already, but am still stumped as to exactly what it is i had to work around.

[codekiller]

can we see the script?

[jmoriconi]

I don't think the script is relevant here since executing ping from the command line is how i first observed the funky behavior, but here's the relevant portion of the code:

// $k is a four digit number, such as 2701 or 1101. These are the unit numbers for stores in a fast food chain that uses mnemonic IP's in its WAN
$stip1 = substr($k,0,2);
$stip2 = substr($k,2,2);
settype($stip1, "integer");
settype($stip2, "integer");
exec("ping -c 2 -q 10.$stip1.$stip2.253",$bmtest);

From the command line, typing:
ping 10.27.01.253 will return "unknown host"
ping 10.27.1.253 will return ping results.
ping 10.11.01.253 will return ping results as 10.11.1.253.

The strangest thing is that i came in this morning and 10.27.01.253 now gets converted to 10.27.1.253 when pinging it. Nothing has changed on our network since yesterday when i made my post. I guess it isn't too important since setting the script's ip strings to integer does the converting for Suse ES 9, but it had me stumped for days and I just can't let it go. heheh... call me OCD.