The following (evil) code runs more than TWICE as fast as the nmap method
for i in {1..254} ;do (ping 192.168.1.$i -c 1 -w 5 >/dev/null && echo "192.168.1.$i" &) ;done
takes around 10 seconds, where the standard nmap
nmap -sP 192.168.1.1-254
takes 25 seconds...