Question

How to retry a bash command until its status is ok or until a timeout is reached?

My best shot (I’m looking for something simpler):

NEXT_WAIT_TIME=0
COMMAND_STATUS=1
until [ $COMMAND_STATUS -eq 0 || $NEXT_WAIT_TIME -eq 4 ]; do
  command
  COMMAND_STATUS=$?
  sleep $NEXT_WAIT_TIME
  let NEXT_WAIT_TIME=NEXT_WAIT_TIME+1
done

Answer 1

You can simplify things a bit by putting command right in the test and doing increments a bit differently. Otherwise the script looks fine:

NEXT_WAIT_TIME=0
until (( NEXT_WAIT_TIME == 5 )) || cmd; do
    sleep "$(( NEXT_WAIT_TIME++ ))"
done
(( NEXT_WAIT_TIME < 5 ))