What command can be used to determine whether a packet drop has occurred?

The most effective command to determine whether a packet drop has occurred from the provided options is the ping command. This tool can send Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo requests to a target host and report back on whether responses (echo replies) are received. By observing the results, you can identify packet loss as indicated by timeouts or responses not being received for some of the sent packets.

If there is a packet drop, it will be reflected in the output, showing percentage loss and the round-trip times of successful responses.

Other commands such as traceroute and tcpdump serve different purposes; traceroute is mainly used for determining the path packets take to a destination and finding any latency at each step, while tcpdump is a packet analysis tool that captures and displays packet data on the network for more in-depth troubleshooting. However, they do not specifically indicate packet loss in the simple way that ping does. Thus, ping stands out as the direct and effective command to assess packet loss.