Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi

I am using perl to ping a list of nodes - with script below :

Code:

$p = Net::Ping->new("icmp");
        if ($p->ping($host,1)){
                print "$host is alive.\n";
        }
        else {
                print "$host is unreacheable.\n";
        }
      $p->close();

This works fine however I want the script to tell me the reason why ping fails for the hosts that are not pingable.
Is there any way to print reason why $host is unreacheable using Net::Ping ?
If not is there a better way to ping list of hosts using Perl ?

Thanks
Bernard