mjhjmtu

Let me start this by saying that I'm still learning bash scripting and I'm not aware of many things. If I miss something, feel free to scold me as you please.

Onward, I'm creating a simple bash script to run a ping to 2 different hosts and output to a file.
I already got that covered, and it's working.
Out of curiosity, I added in the script to output date after and before the ping output print, so I know how long it did take to run the pinging.
I set ping to 1 second interval, 10 pings, 2 hosts.
My first date (was a long time ago...) had 14:36:20 as hourstamp.
The second date (after the ping) had 14:36:40 as hourstamp.

So, the date waited for both pings to finish. This means the pings ran sequentially.

Can I make them run concurrently, so I spend 10 seconds running the script instead of 20 seconds?

Here comes the snippet of my script:

date >> teste.txt
cat hosts.txt | while read output
do ping -c 10 -i 1 "$output" >> teste.txt
done
date >> teste.txt

There are several other things I will want this is script to do, but I promise I will only ask if I can't find a satisfactory answer on Barsa.

PS: hosts.txt is where I store the hosts I want to ping.

The wording of your question is a little difficult to understand, but I think you are looking for something like :

command & 
command &
wait

The script will execute the two commands in the background and wait for the response.

However, in your case, you need to be careful of a race condition. You probably would want to send the output of the individual commands into temporary files and then cat them into the main file, so you would probably do something like :

command > "$tmp1" & 
command > "$tmp2" & 
wait
cat "$tmp1" "$tmp2" >> "$main"
rm -f "$tmp1" "$tmp2"

Update:
You could try xargs (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15755422/linux-bash-script-to-ping-multiple-hosts-simultaneously)

With GNU Parallel you can do this:

date >> teste.txt
cat hosts.txt | parallel -j0 ping -c 10 -i 1 >> teste.txt
date >> teste.txt