Nping is designed to be very flexible and fit a wide variety of needs. As with most command-line tools, its behavior can be adjusted using command-line options. These general principles apply to option arguments, unless stated otherwise.

Options that take integer numbers can accept values specified in decimal, octal or hexadecimal base. When a number starts with 0x, it will be treated as hexadecimal; when it simply starts with 0, it will be treated as octal. Otherwise, Nping will assume the number has been specified in base 10. Virtually all numbers that can be supplied from the command line are unsigned so, as a general rule, the minimum value is zero. Users may also specify the word random or rand to make Nping generate a random value within the expected range.

IP addresses may be given as IPv4 addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.1), IPv6 addresses (e.g. 2001:db8:85a3::8e4c:760:7146), or hostnames, which will be resolved using the default DNS server configured in the host system.

Options that take MAC addresses accept the usual colon-separated 6 hex byte format (e.g. 00:50:56:d4:01:98). Hyphens may also be used instead of colons (e.g. 00-50-56-c0-00-08). The special word random or rand sets a random address and the word broadcast or bcast sets ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff.